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UNITED STATES OF AMEBIC A. 



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HOUGHTS 



A 



BOUT 



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RT. 



By PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTON, 

Author of "A Painter's Camp" 

First American Edition. Revised by the Author. 
One Vol. i6mo. 400 pages. Price $2.00. 



CONTENTS. 



1 . That Certain Artists should write 

on Art. 

2. Painting- from Nature. 

3. Painting- from Memoranda. 

4. The Place of Landscape Painting 

amongst the Fine Arts. 

5. The Relation between Photog- 

raphy and Painting. 

6. Wood Painting and Color Paint- 

ing. 

7. Transcendentalism in Painting. 

S. The Law of Progress in Art. 

9. Analysis and Synthesis in Paint- 
ing. 



10. The Reaction from Pre-Raphael- 

itism. 

11. The Painter in His Relation to 

Society. 

12. Picture Buying. 

13. The Housing of National Art 

Treasures. 

14. Fame. 

15. Art Criticism. 

16. Proudhon as a Writer on Art. 

17. Two Art Philosophers. 

18. Furniture. 

19. The Artistic Spirit. 



Since the publication of that charming volume, " A Painter's 
Camp," Mr. Hamerton has published " The Unknown River: 
An Etcher's Voyage of Discovery," with thirty-seven illustra- 
tions, etched from nature, by the author. The Unknown River 
was the Arroux, a tributary of the Loire, and the voyage was 
performed in a boat built by the author, with his dog Tom for 
his only companion; and the illustrations were etched from na- 
ture on the way. Nothing can be more delightful than this 
volume ; it is a marvel of artistic interest. 

" Thoughts about Art" will be mailed, postpaid, to any ad- 
dress, on receipt of the advertised price, by the publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



GEORGE SAND'S NOVELS. 



I. MAUPRAT. Translated by Virginia Vaughan. 
II. ANTONIA. Translated by Virginia Vaughan. 

III. MONSIEUR SYLVESTRE. Translated by Francis 

George Shaw. 

IV. THE MAN OF SNOW. Translated by Virginia Vaughan. 
V. THE MILLER OF ANGIBATJLT. Translated by Miss 

Mary E. Dewey. 
A standard Library Edition, uniformly bound, in neat lQmo volumes. Each 
volume sold separately. Price $1.50. 



SOME NOTICES OF "MAUPRAT." 

''An admirable translation. As to 'Mauprat,' with which novel Roberts 
brothers introduce the first of French novelists to the American public, if there 
were any doubts as to George Sand's power, it would for ever set them at rest. 
. . . The object of the story is to show how, by her (Edmee's) noble nature, he 
(Mauprat) is subsequently transformed from a brute to a man ; his sensual pas- 
sion to a pure and holy love." — Harper's Monthly. 

" The excellence of George Sand, as we understand it, lies in her comprehen- 
ds.::!! of the primitive elements of mankind. She has conquered her way into the 
human heart, and whether it is at peace or at war, is the same to her ; for she is 
mistress of all its moods. No woman before ever painted the passions and the 
emotions with such force and fidelity, and with such consummate art. Whatever 
else she may be, she is always an artist. . . . Love is the key-note of k Mauprat,' 
— love, and what it can accomplish in taming an otherwise untamable spirit. 
The hero, Bernard Mauprat, grows up with his uncles, who are practically ban- 
dits, as was not uncommon with men of their class, in the provinces, belore ihe 
breaking out of the French Revolution. He is a young savage, of whom the best 
that can be said is, that he is only less wicked than his relatives, because he h;\3 
somewhere within him a sense of generosity and honor, to which they are entire 
strangers. To sting this sense iuto activity, to detect the makings of a man in this 
brute, to make this brute into a man, is the difficult problem, which is worked 
out by love, — the love of Bernard for his cousin Edniee, and hers for him, — the 
love of two strong, passionate, noble natures, locked in a life-and-death struggle, 
in which the man is finally overcome by the unconquerable strength of woman- 
hood. Only a great writer could have described such a struggle, and only a great 
artist could have kept it within allowable limits. This George Sand has done, ww 
think ; for her portrait of Bernard is vigorous without being coarse, and her situ 
ations are strong without being dangerous. Such, at least, is the impression we 
have received from reading ' Mauprat,' which, besides being an admirable study 
of character, is also a fine picture of French provincial life and manners." — Put- 
nam's Monthly. 

" Roberts Brothers propose to publish a series of translations of George 
Sand's better novels. We can hardly say that all are worth appearing In English ; 
but it is certain that the k better ' list will comprise a good many which are worth 
translating, and among these is ' Mauprat,' — though by no means the best of 
them. Written to show the possibility of constancy in man, a love inspired be- 
fore and continuing through marriage, it is itself a contradiction to a good many 
of the popular notions respecting the author, — who is generally supposed to be 
as indifferent to the sanctities of the marriage relation as was her celebrated an- 
cestor, Augustus of Saxony. . . . The translation is admirable. It i« seldom that 
one reads such good English in a work translated from any language. The new 
series is inaugurated in the best possible way, under the hands of Miss Vaughan 
and we trust that she may have a great deal to do with its continuance. It 
is not everyone who can read French who can write English so well." — Old 
and New- 



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Recent New Books. 



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A PAINTER'S CAMP. 

BY PHILIP GILBERT HAMERTOJS. 

In Three Books. Book I., In England ; Book II., In Scotland ; 
Book III., In France. 1 vol. 16mo. Price $1.50. 



From The Atlantic Monthly. 

" They (' A Painter's Camp in the Highlands,' and ' Thoughts about Art ') are 
the most useful books that could be placed in the hands of the American Art 
public. If we were asked where the most intelligent, the most trustworthy, the 
most practical, and the most interesting exposition of Modern Art and cognate 
subjects is to be found, we should point to Hamerton's writings." 

From The Round Table. 

" Considered merely in its literary aspect, we know of no pleasanter book than 
this for summer reading. Artistically, we consider it a most valuable addition 
to rur literature." 

From The New York Tribune. 

"In the pursuit of his profession as a landscape-painter, the author has not 
hesitated to plunge into the remote and unattractive nooks and corners of nature, 
gathering a rich store of materials for his pencil, and describing his whimsical 
experiences with a gayety and unction in perfect keeping with the subject. His 
account of the practical methods by which he conquered the difficulties of the 
position is instructive in the extreme, while the anecdotes and adventures which 
he relates with such exuberant fun make his book one of the most entertaining 
of the season." 

From The Philadelphia Evening Telegraph. 

'* We are not addicted to enthusiasm, but the little work before us is really so 
full of good points that we grow so admiring as to appear almost fulsome in its 
praise. . . It has been many a day since we have been called upon to review a 
work which gave us such real pleasure." 

From The Boston Transcript. 

" The volume is divide! into three books, recording the writer's experience 
respectively in England, Scotland, and France. The volume is interesting, not 
merely for the amount of suggestive thought and fresh observation it contains 
bearing on the authors own profession, but for its sketches of character and 
scenery, and its shrewd and keen remarks on topics disconnected with Art. There 
are very few chapters of foreign travel, for instance, which are so admirable in 
every respect as Mr. Hamerton's article on ' A Little French City ; ' and the gen- 
eral opinions on Art given in the ' Epilogue ' are worthy the attention of all 
painters, especially of the champions of extreme schools. We have never seen 
any of Mr. Hamerton's pictures ; but if he paints as delightfully as he writes, he 
must be an artist of more than common skill." 



Sold by all Booksellers. Mailed, postpaid, on receipt of price by the 
Publisher's, 

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Boston. 



AMERICAN RELIGION. 



BY 



JOHN WEISS. 






BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1871. 



3> 






^ 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 

JOHN WEISS, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



CAMBRIDGE : 
PRESS OF JOHN WILSON AND SON. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

I. Right Mental Method i 

II. America's Debt 32 

III. The American Opportunity 56 

IV. The Divine Immanence 86 

V. Law of the Divine Immanence .... 109 

VI. A Divine Person 139 

VII. An American Atonement 166 

VIII. False and True Praying 191 

IX. Strife and Symmetry 220 

X. A Conscience for Truth 244 

XL Constancy to an Ideal 270 

XII. The American Soldier 297 



AMERICAN RELIGION. 



I. 

RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 

SOME mental method must exist to control all the 
applications of Thought in morals and religion. 
Of course it is trite to say there must be method 
everywhere. The Oneida Community ran to waste 
year after year for want of method in its trade and 
farming, till a French Canadian came there with a 
mouse-trap of his invention, and caught prosperity. 
No trap had ever before so nicely corresponded to the 
cunning of surplus mice. Method is simply an adap- 
tation to the facts. The sculptor discovers what form 
of tool will hollow a knee-joint, and he saves time for 
the face. Philosophers and theologians grow stiff in 
that joint because they refuse to walk in Nature's way. 
But the great discoveries of Newton and Kepler had 
nothing mysterious : they were the gestures of men 
without preconceptions to methodize, whose ways 
were so near to Nature that they kept the rare brains 
susceptible to organic laws ; so that their genius was 
their health. 

Method rules the distinction between the literary 
man and the Bohemian, the scholar and the charlatan. 



2 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Mere mental and emotional ability works extrava- 
gantly, and falls poor at last, perhaps quite suddenly, 
unless it has the grace to ally itself with certain old 
necessities of the universe, either as horse in the traces 
or driver upon the seat. A great deal of American 
literary and religious striving runs to sentimentalism 
because the fatigue of discovering the order of the 
world is found to be too great. 

There can be but one mental method, and that is 
when intelligence discerns and repeats the way in 
which natural and spiritual things develop. The idea 
of unity presides over this : an idea which starts in 
our own personal oneness ; the organic integrity that 
precedes good and bad, right and wrong, all dualism 
and dispute. The first assurance which this idea gives 
the mind, or struggles, amid the horde of theologies 
and preconceptions to give it, is, that all things have 
the consistency of being developed in one way. Has 
this idea come into our consciousness as a deduction 
from a long series of experimental observations, a 
century-plant composted by all the soils, and tended 
by all the races of mankind, or is it the original form 
of the mind that is kept constantly stirring by observa- 
tion, lest an overdose of mythologizing should prove 
fatal? If we say it is only a late result of a long 
series of observations, carried on by different races of 
men, and transmitted in imperfect stages of deduction 
'to the present, we do not account for the first step 
which the mind made towards the idea. However 
bunglingly made, the impulse to make it must have 
previously resided in the mind. Some character of 
the mental constitution must have decided that relation 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. ; 

towards the observation of facts which we perceive to 
result in a law of unity. If, on the other hand, we say 
that it was at the earliest period innate in the mind — 
meaning that mind could not be born without having 
it expressed, not merely implied, in its structure — we 
cannot account for observation, nor explain the imper- 
fect attempts it made on the road to the idea. If an 
idea be innate, it must preside over the whole process 
of experimental knowledge, prevent early misunder- 
standings, and impress every stage of observation with 
its own sense of the true method of the universe. It 
is plain, then, that two things run parallel with each 
other, and are capable of touching for mutual inter- 
action : the universe and the mental structure ; and the 
observing faculty moves in the company of an explain- 
ing faculty, which is a developing tendency, and not 
an innate idea. There was a time when all facts lay 
latent in the universe, and all co-ordinating instincts 
lay latent in the mind. But the first material fact 
found a mental comrade, whose hand groped after it, 
and both began to feel their way together towards a 
principle of unity. 

The idea of unity was once an inchoate form, laid *> 
helplessly upon the breast of the divine order : a 
capacity to imbibe, assimilate, reduce to function and 
organ, the teeming facts ; not innate, but inchoate, 
and not even now hardened into manhood nor proceed- 
ing through all persons ; but it has preserved, amid its 
fumbling and complaining, the power to drain the 
great Order into all its veins. It came from beneath 
the bosom at which it suckles, and the circuit is 
complete. 



4 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

What is meant by saying that all things have the 
consistency of being developed in one way ? It means 
that all effects flow out of all causes in unbroken con- 
tinuity of direction, thought and purpose ; that the 
forethought of the Creative Mind, present at every point 
of space in every moment of time, brings succession 
of ail phenomena without a break, without a spasm, 
without an after-thought or an interpolation ; that the 
divine ability eternally possessed this intention of grad- 
ualism and unbroken uniformity, both in matter and 
mind ; that the words genera, species, strata, epochs, 
transitions, races, and systems, only express our 
mental recognition of characters, but do not confirm 
the existence of breaks, faults, renewals or interposi- 
tions ; that in all cases the agencies which are found 
to be uniformly at work are those which preclude the 
idea of exceptional ones ; and that the idea of excep- 
tional forces or periods belongs to a state of mind whose 
unity is not thoroughly set free. According as a man 
knows himself he knows the nature of the Cosmos. 
The more he knows himself the more obedient he 
becomes to a consciousness that the famous axiom of 
Hippocrates, u '0 Nopog navxa XQaxvvei" Law governs 
all things, must become the basis of his thought. 

There have been developing periods of intelligence, 
during which the feeling of Law is feebler than the 
idea of caprice. All the natural elements favor at first 
a sentiment that phenomena occur by spasms, irrup- 
tions, determinations of personal agency. Persons 
themselves work in this intermittent way, and they 
impute it to Nature for ages, during which mythology 
is born. All mythologies are merely the emphasis 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 5 

which the want of intelligence puts upon facts and 
appearances : they are lifted and quiver in a mirage 
of heated fancy. But the crude intelligence has noth- 
ing else to start from ; and it begins in this way to 
develop itself with a simple and uninstructed percep- 
tion that there are some very wonderful elements of 
nature and mind. 

Now, although at first all method was mythological, 
yet the most scientific period of a race or of the world 
may still have its mythology, because all minds do not 
develop abreast of each other into the form of unity. 
The most religious people may be the most infested 
with the sentiment that God sometimes inserts paren- 
theses into creation, because religion, in its limited 
sense, is only a tendency to acknowledge that there 
must be something invisible to man and superior to 
his knowledge. Religion in its widest sense is the 
same as mental unity, and it invests the invisible with 
its own overpowering consciousness that the invisible 
is a continuity of Law. 

Mythology blossoms and exhales. Its pungent aro- 
ma is what men call the Supernatural. With a root 
in the ground, and leaves that imbibe the simple ele- 
ments of nature, the moment it comes to perfume 
men pronounce it the true Invisible. But it is still 
only matter in a tenuous form. 

How shall we distinguish ? We cannot call every 
thing Nature, or every thing Supernature. In the 
former we do not recognize the making of Nature : in 
the latter we lose the order of the things that are 
made. There must always be the Natural because , 
there is always the Supernatural. But our own men- 



f) AMERICAN RELIGION; 

tal form of unity reveals to us the nature of the Super- 
natural, whether we believe that this mental form is 
the net result of all human experience, or that it is a 
primitive constituent of mind. There can be no 
quarrel here, nor can there be any obscurity in defin- 
ing the Supernatural, since the idea of unity which is 
actual at the end of one process is latent at the begin- 
ning of the other. What is chiefly important to note 
is that when Nature is best understood — and that is 
when Mind is most perfectly developed — the Super- 
natural appears as the ground and efficient cause of 
uniformity, gradual successiveness, perpetual invaria- 
bility ; and irruptions from the invisible are crowded 
out by the sustenance of Law. 

This has a reflex effect upon the past. Our growing 
conviction that Law sustains every thing, and holds 
a lineal, undislocated course through all provinces, 
interprets the past, and, in doing so, eliminates every 
trace of its mythologies. Nothing is left of mankind's 
views upon the Supernatural, unless the idea of natural 
sequence has been mixed up with them. Nothing is 
left, except a religious sense that there is something 
invisible. But one of the most important branches of 
Comparative Religion is that which we may call Essen- 
tial Mythology, or the real, natural, moral, and spirit- 
ual ideas, which, in their struggle towards the light of 
unity, figured in the myths and legends of the past. 
The object of Essential Mythology is to show how 
logically the Divine assumed these phases in the human 
mind ; this relative incompleteness, these tentative 
efforts, like the succession of animals, from things that 
creep to things that fly ; this congruity and command- 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 7 

ing forethought, always sufficient to itself, that takes 
the shortest line between two points, and never breaks 
it when expected by ignorance, or desired by passion, 
or pretended by marvellousness. A true science of 
mythology will pronounce marvellousness the forlorn 
resort of a mind not yet equipped with unity. When 
Hippocrates said that there was no divine disease,* he 
gave the first distinct contribution towards the scientific 
theory of development, which shows saucer-eyed fancy 
that the naturalness of every thing is its divinity, and 
that the invisible never plays tricks with its own eter- 
nal sequence, no matter what may be the stake, life 
or death, or the spiritual health of human souls. Any 
thing that is truly desirable is already profoundly 
supernatural, because it flows out of its own essence, 
or springs from its own seed. 

The supernaturalists, who believe in miracles and 
the exceptional nature of Christ, cling to that theory 
of development which asserts a special intervention 
of the Creator at the commencement of fresh forms 
of animal life in those epochs known to Geology. 
This theory does not despise a logical order, but finds 
it in the thought upon which these forms are strung, 
and not in the gradual derivation of them by any 
principle of selection, or primitive tendency, or strug- 
gle for existence, from the forms just preceding. The 
supernaturalists prefer the theory of the intervention- 

* This Greek superstition, which Hippocrates first dis- 
credited, was that the different kinds of insanity represented 
possession by different deities. Something in the style of the 
insane person was analogous to the characteristic of the god, 
and consequently was referred to him as its source. 



b AMERICAN RELIGION. 

ists to that of the gradualists, not so much because 
the latter would derive man from some chimpan- 
zee, as because the former break up creation into suc- 
cessive epochs, with a supernatural irruption at the 
head of each. This gives a color to their theology of 
intervention ; and Christ appears, not as a gradual 
blossom on the stem of human nature, but a new crea- 
tion, and the first member of a new series. Then it is 
not difficult to suppose that the miracles came in with 
the miraculous conception of the new man. If the 
first man was built afresh and not slowly evolved from 
any thing, did such supernatural events cease then, or 
have there been subsequent incursions from a higher 
sphere, to add new forms of spiritual life to human 
society ? 

Now the theory of intervention, which theology is 
lately disposed to press into its service, cannot be 
applied to the mental and spiritual growth of mankind. 
It may or may not be true through all the geological 
eras, and Darwinism may be shown to be a scheme 
without a constituency, by the facts serving more and 
more the theory of a sequence of thought with spasms * 

* Mr. Huxley, who is a gradualist, does not think it is es- 
sential to deny that nature sometimes passes, by a leap, to her 
fresh varieties, since the leap itself marks only the method 
of the force that gathers to it, and not a divine impromptu, 
or thrusting in. He says : " We have always thought that 
Mr. Darwin has unnecessarily hampered himself by adhering 
so strictly to his favorite ' Natura non facit saltum? We 
greatly suspect that she does make considerable jumps in the 
way of variation, now and then, and that these saltations 
give rise to some of the gaps which appear to exist in the 
series of known forms." 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 9 

in the application. But this is beyond our province : we 
confine ourselves to seeing that, since the creation of 
man, Comparative Religion does not furnish one fact 
to justify the idea of mental development by special 
intervention. Every race shows gradualism in all the 
provinces of its intelligence, a passage of embryotic 
thought through all its phases, without a single break 
or interpolation for which natural causes are not suffi- 
cient to account. The Divinity within the natural 
causes has assumed gradualism for its method. Every 
kind of truth has spread by the gradual contact of 
colonization, emigration, or conquest, from one race 
to another. Upon every meridian the same embryotic 
ideas of morals and religion are found, which develop 
with variations due to local influences alone. All 
religious souls and leaders have been substantially 
alike in the raw material of their thought. In East 
and West, in India, Judea and Greece, all of the sages 
and prophets have shared each others' essentials : be- 
neath the hue of all their cheeks the composition of the 
blushing blood has been identical. The inchoate 
mind of the race has brought a correspondence to life 
and nature, and kept it everywhere and transmitted it. 
So that intervention, if it ever was the preadamitic 
plan, has been since changed to immanence : the even, 
perpetual, unbroken, unhasting, unresting Presence. 
Comparative Mythology and Religion find no super- 
natural distinction between the order and texture of 
the ideas of all the great teachers. Confucius develops 
towards disinterested morality and monotheism, in other 
words, towards mental unity; -and so do Zoroaster, 
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Christ. The ethnological 



IO AMERICAN RELIGION. 

distinctions do not break the type, nor clamor for the 
supernatural. We find inequalities of growth, a sur- 
plus of one thought here, of another there, a variety 
of combinations ; but no point where there is an inter- 
polation of an impulse or principle which the general 
soul might not have always been credited with in vari- 
ous embryotic stages. We find amplification, and the 
correction that is the result of an increase of intelli- 
gence, differences in degree but not in kind : neither 
in a man, nor in a race, nor an epoch, can you find a 
break in the linear development, and in the transmissi- 
bility, by the total of births on the planet, of all the 
essential substances of morals and religion. Shak- 
speare and Beethoven are rooted in the general imag- 
ination which they overshadow, and upon which they 
shower blossom and fruit. So do Socrates and Christ 
confirm the logic of the inchoate mind. 

The history of thought or of religion is that of a 
great crescendo movement, that takes up the feebler 
chords and pronounces them more strongly as it pro- 
ceeds, drops out the partial chords or overcomes them 
by the outbursting unity, and accentuates the great 
theme by developing and not by thrusting in. The 
composer has his whole orchestra upon the spot ; he 
neither invents nor interpolates an instrument, but 
wakes them to all combinations. If he gives a few 
bars rest to the reeds or the brass, the motive of the 
piece proceeds, and is just as immanent in a pause as 
in a climax. In the gradual growth of thought, we 
find that the first faint tendency to account for all 
things in some way, by connecting them with a myth- 
ical personage, or with moisture, with fire, with nurn- 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. II 

bers, with a First Cause, has been the self-sufficing 
seed of the rational method of modern science. The 
anticipations of the foremost minds have been early 
blossoms from it ; lucky divinings and intuitions were 
not intruded but evolved. The divine immanence has 
not been impatient at working in this way. Pythag- 
oras differs from Thales by his position in time and 
history, and his superiority is that of subsequence. 
In the province of Religion, we detect a faint sense 
of the divine Fatherhood, long before Judea becomes 
fragrant with filial confidence. When we are aston- 
ished in spring to see a western prairie one rolling 
fire of flowers, we do not think of an irruption but of 
an evolution. And when the pine forest burns down, 
and oaks succeed, we are reminded of the natural 
latency of the germs in all the successions of mankind. 
The only supernatural condition is that of perpetual 
indwelling when Christ comes after Socrates. 

No doubt there are periods in human history when 
the divine proceeding lifts itself in great enthusiasm, 
and some man or movement, collecting it into mem- 
orable expression, gives it a name that survives, to 
mark the highest point of thought or morals. The 
supernaturalist claims that such periods have some- 
thing exceptional in them. I have heard them called 
nodes, and compared to the swelling of the smooth 
cane-plant into the joints that support its whole devel- 
opment ; but we must not forget that the joints are 
only gatherings of the elements already in the stem : 
the silex is not different, the carbon is the same. No 
intrusion has brought into the composition of the joint 
a quality which the stem is not competent to furnish. 



12 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Or we may compare these moments of the creative 
power to the high tides that wet all the coast-lines 
and leave behind, as they ebb, the sea-wrack to delin- 
eate the extreme they reached. Men visit the fresh 
heaps to collect tokens of the. distance whence the 
wave arrived. But we must be careful to explain 
that the tide which rises and then ebbs wets every 
square inch of its movement with identical elements : 
its highest point is not reached by means of the intru- 
sion of a new constituent, and the force that lifts it is 
also at every point the same. The natural advantages 
of the inchoate mind of mankind have simply been ex- 
panded, but they have not been altered by the insertion 
of any elements ; so that you cannot expect such 
periods to be illustrated by any modification of natural 
laws : the functions of life and death remain untam- 
pered with ; no more men are raised from the dead 
than before ; no preternatural signs can emphasize 
what is intrinsically emphatic, or lend it any recom- 
mendation. The general mind, through which the 
tide came sweeping, will sooner or later recognize 
itself with wonder and gratitude, and find that not a 
law of nature has been meddled with. Stories will 
cluster around remarkable men and moments, as 
they do around remarkable features of a landscape. 
The savage will have his tradition about some natural 
gathering of forces in geological displacements ; in 
the growth and endurance of mighty trees ; in the 
encroachment of the ocean upon old districts that 
were peopled ; in the benefits that ancestors derived 
from the sagacity of some stranger who represented 
their own qualities enlarged. When he is gone they 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 1 3 

celebrate the high tide to which they came in him. 
This is only because the scientific method was not yet 
awake to refer phenomena of matter or mind to their 
own invariable constituents. The savage constructs a 
story as huge and nebulous as the impression which 
the eclipse or the subterranean shudder makes upon 
his imagination. A great man is a signal for an unme- 
thodical generation to have an attack of mythology. 
It falls to marvelling where the man of science, who 
explores all structures with the tool of mental unity, 
is content to wonder and adore. We must be care- 
ful not to infer from the past effects of marvellous- 
ness the possibility of miracle. And we need not 
import into the period that excites the marvel, any 
more than into the joint of the cane-plant, a quality 
that did not build the average from which the period 
rose. 

When the great men appear, perhaps upon some 
lowly stock, to spread a sudden blossom whose report 
fills all the world, and liberates a fragrance that is not 
exclusive but welcome and suitable to all mankind, 
at first we marvel, and the disposition is to ask, " Who 
can trace these miraculous conceptions ? " But we do 
not wish to trace a Shakspeare farther than to discover 
that the divine climax of his imagination was slowly 
gathered out of human nature. If we approach the 
fact without prejudice, the method of nature will con- 
vince us that w T hen God came to a high-tide in him, 
He came with the humanity furnished by a hundred 
ancestors, through all of whom He had been present, 
building and modifying brain-cells and dispositions in 
the ordinary way of inheritance, till, when He Shak- 



14 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

spearized, it was not with incursion of fresh elements 
that were not previously in the poet's line. The 
patience of Nature selected that brain at length to con- 
dense her pathos and her laughter like a dew : but 
the common air and light hung upon its myriad points 
those lucid drops that sparkle as long as the genera- 
tions which provide those elements can notice them. 

Such moments that receive a great man's name 
only emphasize God's ordinary meanings, all of which 
receive their turn in religion, poetry and art ; and 
mankind climbs with these to clearer outlooks over 
their natural horizon. But, in the emphasis received 
by such a moment, what is there to disturb the order 
of nature? Things that lie in a different province, — 
such as the specific gravity of water, the condition of 
a dead body, the normal production of the vine, the 
laws of human embryology, the blossoming of a fig- 
tree, — cannot become modified, or put forth excep- 
tional phenomena. As soon, and with as much reason, 
might the moments when Hamlet was composed have 
received superfluous attesting by quickened fermenta- 
tion of all the beer in Stratford. 

What place is there, then, in history, for any thing 
more supernatural than this incessant Presence ? Sure- 
ly one would think that it would suffice the craving 
of the most inveterate thaumaturgist. Indeed, it is a 
wonder that there is any thing at all, or that there ever 
was any thing, including God himself! The vast fact 
feeds the imagination till it is too cloyed for the confec- 
tionery of miracles. Sometimes it seems inexplicable 
that there was never nothing at all. " But why then," 
urges the supernaturalist, " after being obliged to put 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 15 

at the beginning of your series a miracle, namely, the 
creation of something, whether out of fulness or of 
nothingness, should you shrink from repetitions of the 
first divine act that we can conceive? It was a first 
supernatural step : why may there not have been sub- 
sequent steps, making the same gesture of incursion? 
You strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." The 
universe proffers its own reply to this by furnishing us 
with the right mental method. The first step w r as 
no more supernatural than the God who stepped ; no 
more nor less. The gradualism of all subsequent 
creation refers us back to gradualism in the remotest 
original purpose of the divine mind. We cannot use 
the word " beginning," or say that there was ever such 
a thing or movement. The first term in the series of 
all phenomena was essential Eternity : there must 
then have been eternally a proceeding forth out of 
Eternity. There must eternally have been the simple 
forthcoming, of which all things are modes, gradually 
developed, but never aside from the continuous com- 
pany of the divine developer. Is it too dogmatic to 
say that there was no such thing as intervention at 
first, nor interpolation : not a spasm, nor an alteration 
of essential condition ; not a jump from rest to motion, 
from nonentity to pleroma, from pleroma to primitive 
substance? The whole universe puts the stamp of 
its method upon the eternal proceeding of the universe. 
Eternal continuity precludes the possibility of a first 
act, a first flaking-off, a first motion. The phrase is 
" I am," but the deep, unbroken breathing that voices 
it has neither beginning nor end. 

But suppose there was a first act, and admit the 



1 6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

claim that it was a supernatural transfer of power, or 
passage from one state to another, or intrusion of 
spirit into matter, or waking from rest to motion, or 
quickening of passive germs, — just as you please to 
state it. If this act placed all the laws of nature upon 
their route of gradual development, the act itself is 
a proclamation of the impossibility of supernatural 
interference with the method which the act involved. 
Then it becomes a question of scientific observation of 
the method; and while the facts are coming in, and 
opinions differ, we must mark the tendency. And if 
you hear any noted man of science affirm that he 
finds nothing in nature incompatible with the idea of 
miracles, ask him if he finds any thing in nature com- 
patible with it. That is the real point. He may 
say, particularly if he does not like to compromise 
his position in an orthodox community, that none 
of the facts he has ever collected deny the theory 
of special interventions, and that for all he knows 
there may be miracles to-day. Yet while he says 
it, the ground he stands on is consistency and con- 
tinuity of law. A single break in that lets all his 
facts through into chaos ; and instead of a contriver 
and constructor he becomes a cJiiffonier or junk- 
merchant : naturalist and supernaturalist may stock 
his bag or buy his truck. If a man of science thinks 
that a thing lies out of his province, he will be very 
likely to say that he knows nothing against it. He 
w T ill not meddle with revivals, nor dispute on infant 
baptism. Politics he may ignore. If he is led to in- 
vestigate the modern spiritualism, his scientific instinct 
detects the shadowy nature of the claim that spirits 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 17 

intrude into the organization of living persons to con- 
trol them. For the breath of his intellect is the idea 
of non-intrusion, non-intervention, the inviolability of 
every province that is controlled by necessary laws. 
The moment that science consents to apply its princi- 
ples to mooted questions, delusion vanishes before the 
steps of method : the forces that are sufficient now are 
declared to have been always sufficient to transact the 
business of nature ; their gradualism and their ada- 
mantine sequence tell the whole secret of the past. 

A confusion arises from the use of the words 
Natural and Supernatural. If a man says he is a Nat- 
uralist he is accused of confining God to one original 
act of creation, which put blind forces on their devel- 
oping way ; of supposing that first throb of divinity 
to widen into the undulations of all phenomena : as 
if the w r orld were like a cannon-ball that carries an 
impulse and leaves the cartridge behind, or the com- 
plicated motion which the stroke of a cue lends to the 
balls upon a billiard-table, without following them 
round. If a man says he is a Naturalist with the 
divine immanence added, he is accused of making the 
immanence just as blind a force as the forces it travels 
with, and it might as well have been left behind. If 
he says the immanence is a distinct Person and Voli- 
tion, he is still accused of leaving out the attributes of 
Paternity and Love : the divine Person only wills the 
fatefulness of laws. If he says that it is an omni- 
present Father of love, who cares for his children, he 
is accused of investing the logic of the universe with 
the phrases of religion, since logic is predestination, 
and that can have no care. If he says that the pre- 



l8 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

destination was of that perfect kind which, in every 
instance, without sacrificing consistency, meeting self- 
ish expectations, or deferring to human ignorance, 
secures true welfare to every form of life, the objector 
replies, " Very well, so I believe." But does he be- 
lieve so ? Then he cannot perceive the legitimate 
results of such a statement. It sounds like something 
which he says in a lucid interval, when his brain is 
not congested with miracle, and he narrowly escapes 
becoming permanently rational. But this is what 
every supernaturalist must really believe : that the 
divine foresight must have arranged for intervention 
as a feature in its consistency, in order to adapt itself 
to exigencies by being something different from its 
own exigency ; a gracious coming in at the nick of 
time to obviate some previous doings of its own, to 
take back its words by saying something in another 
key that is not fateful but fatherly, to lie in wait for 
the critical moment that shall be a signal to fly in the 
face of the immutable order with signs and wonders, 
to get its spiritual excellence attested, by means of the 
little cursory indulgence of a higher law, which science 
will some day adopt. 

Against all this, we must have a mental method that 
is not content with saying that the evidence for super- 
natural interventions is defective, or that if there were 
evidence enough of the right kind they would be ad- 
missible. This is not having a mental method that is 
the counterpart of the universe. The tendency of 
science proclaims its belief that testimony against 
itself is an impossibility : as much as if a number of 
men should take their bible-oath that they felt the 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 19 

earth roll westward. This is not testifying. We can- 
not collect evidence from an ey ^-witness ; the method 
of his mind must affirm the facts. The more an eye- 
witness swears he observed something, the more he 
may convince you that his sight is skin-deep. Our 
method must correspond to the accumulating testimony 
of science, which is that the divine supernature is im- 
mutable procedure through simple facts of nature and 
of mind ; the miraculous is impossible and superfluous, 
because the supernature is detected everywhere, both 
in matter and spirit, doing the whole business of 
Paganism and Christianity, and nourishing the fauna 
and flora of the soul. 

The order of Nature does not merely create an ante- 
cedent improbability that an exception should occur in 
it, but an established order is fatal to the very notion 
of an exception. This appears best on some plain, 
indisputable lines of facts, such as that of the invariable 
disappearance of the soul with the death of the body, 
and its incapability of reviving that body. All human 
bodies have kept dead so uniformly, and for so long a 
time, that we have a right to say that what has occurred 
nine hundred and ninety-nine times will happen on the 
thousandth. We are as sure of it as that the sun will 
rise to-morrow. To say that it is not impossible that 
the sun may not rise to-morrow, is to put the safety of 
a phrase against the salutary dependence which we 
derive from experience. While science and experience 
proclaim what is actual, it is childish to waste breath in 
saying that nothing is impossible. The law by which 
a dead body cannot be revived is an unalterable fate. 
If any bodies, presumptively dead, revive, the pre- 
sumption stands corrected. 



20 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

A favorite objection which has lately been made to 
meet this view, is, that we arrogate a knowledge of 
Nature which no man can possess. Who knows what 
are the laws of Nature, it is said, and if she really had 
always, and always will have, an invariable conformity 
to our present experience ? What do a thousand years' 
observation amount to? They subtend too small an 
arc. And in reality we possess hardly more than a 
hundred or two years of true empirical observation 
with precise deduction. Yet, before all the facts are 
in, it is objected, we proclaim a system of the universe, 
vote miracles out of it because we have not seen any, 
and decide against every kind of supernaturalism, be- 
cause science has not yet found and labelled it. 

The answer to this is very simple. Thousands of 
generations of dead men preceded scientific observa- 
tion. Their graves built the firm continent of at least 
one unalterable sequence. And with respect to other 
facts which have entered into the field of scientific 
observation, the arc subtended by them, though small, 
shows drift and direction. Observation increases the 
draft which that arc makes upon invariable sequence, 
requires it in every province, cannot stir without it, 
draws it more firmly with cumulative evidence of law, 
and summons unity to keep it from straggling on either 
hand. 

" What is the history of every science but the history 
of the elimination of the notion of creative or other 
interferences, with the natural order of the phenomena 
which are the subject-matter of that science ? " 

All past and present statements of supernatural oc- 
currences have been surmised and pretended outside 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 21 

of the province of observation and experiment. There- 
fore there can be neither historical nor scientific proof 
for them. The past cannot be examined, the present 
eludes the scientific step, or surrenders at discretion ; 
the surmised facts disappear as soon as the cross-ques- 
tioning begins. 

And it is a fair assumption of science that the forces 
which are seen to be at work at present, must have 
been the forces always at work, and that their present 
method must have been always the same. When, 
therefore, we perceive no personal necessity, moral or 
spiritual, for any thing beyond, or supplementary to, 
that invariable sequence and recurring consistency 
which is called the system of Nature, we have a right 
to presume that it was always competent to transact 
the business of the human race. If at present it sup- 
plies our most exacting wants, of physical health, of 
conscience, of the observation of facts, and the intui- 
tion of divine truths, the presumption is in favor that 
it always did and will. The arc is small, but it stretches 
both ways with unrefracted suggestion ; and scientific 
observation proceeds powerfully now that it has found 
this track, and is unfettered by abstract, theologic 
notions, or the assumptions of supernaturalism. 

But what if science should emerge some day upon a 
higher law of supernatural intrusion ? An advocate of 
this says that " a tree, seeing a dog run to and fro, might 
call that a miracle. The tree, unable to move from its 
place, could not conceive of the possibility of voluntary 
motion. But no law of nature is violated ; only a 
higher power comes in, — the power of animal life." 
How irrelevant is this. A tree, incapable of astonish- 



22 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

merit, cannot be imagined to be astonished. A man, 
capable of rational and spiritual judgments, and of 
perceiving facts, cannot be remanded into the supposed 
attitude of the tree ; he holds no such fictitious relation 
to any real or supposed facts, for he is already similar 
in mental and spiritual quality to any epoch which has 
claimed the guarantee of miracle. 

It is said that " we see such wonderful discoveries 
made every day of latent powers in Nature, and secrets 
hidden till now from all men, that we do not know 
where to put limits to the possibility of the wonderful." 
To receive a telegram, to have your portrait painted 
by the sun, to catalogue the metals in the sun's atmos- 
phere, — these things would have seemed miracles a 
few years ago. Here is a confusion of terms. The 
wonderful, the incredible, are words which we apply 
to the normal developments of science. But the prog- 
ress of science cannot legitimate an old reputed mir- 
acle till it repeats it. When the science that perfects 
sun-pictures, or analyzes the stellar spectrum, can raise 
another Lazarus, then the wonder it excites will be 
of the same kind as that which the so-called miracle 
supposes and propagates. Marvellousness itself, that 
residue of Fetichism, is the real curiosity in human 
nature, and not any story which it may invent. Its 
mythologies are less worth noticing than the fact that 
the unscientific mind tends constantly to produce them. 
If marvellousness were an essential quality of human 
nature, devised for the recognition of the supernatural, it 
ought to be as strong with cultivated people, and the men 
whose genius lies in discovery, as with children and bar- 
barians. But it is a rudimentary condition. The child 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 23 

will hanker for the exceptional, the man for uniformity. 
Human nature, with all its over-haste, does not really 
come across the supernatural till the best minds prove 
that it is impossible unless it is in law. But this uni- 
formity works with such materials that it is a perpetual 
surprise and stimulus to the imagination. The man of 
science is always wondering what next will yield to 
him, so that he enriches his method with the spoils of 
a universe. 

Shakspeare, to give his ghost some plausibility, said 
there were more things in heaven and earth than are 
dreamt of in our philosophy. The theologian quotes 
this with a fine disdain of the Naturalist, who is sup- 
posed not to allow any thing in heaven and earth but 
himself and his lean theory. But if there be a Holy 
Ghost commensurate with the universe, why need little 
ghosts carry coals to Newcastle ? There is One who 
makes them scent the morning air. The Naturalist 
sees everywhere through the continuity of law a God, 
who says to him, a I Am." The supernaturalist jumps 
in with his god from time to time, and, like the clown 
in the circus, cheerily announces, " Here we are ! " 

But the expectation, that science will yet find a law 
that may undertake the miraculous business of the past 
and future, persists in alleging our imperfect knowl- 
edge of facts. They may betray a different tendency, 
and interrupt the invariability of phenomena. Are 
there not already some occult elements which occasion- 
ally displace the ordinary processes of the mind, and 
connect it in an exceptional way with the invisible? 
And although the majority of the facts of the natural 
world seem to furnish to science the constancy it de- 



24 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

lights in, may not the rest, grouped for the present 
under the term Spiritualism, claim a place in the same 
constant series, and keep a postern open towards the 
invisible world ? 

There are, it is true, some occult facts connected with 
the unconscious or automatic action of the brain, which 
supply modern spiritualism with all the phenomena 
that delude it into a belief that dead people communi- 
cate, that spirits read through sensitive people sealed 
books, buried thoughts, remote contingencies, that an 
ignorant person is more enlightened than Bacon and 
Newton upon the constitution of the universe, that 
personal immortality is as tangible as a pump-handle. 
When these facts, which have been hitherto slurred 
by scientific investigation, take their legitimate place 
among the obscure and exceptional traits of the human 
brain, they will be found to belong, as is already more 
than suspected, to the great fact that a human brain is 
a gallery of photographs of memory handed down 
from the past and enlarged by the present ; that they 
may lie in latency, as in a family lumber-room, and be 
overlooked or forgotten ; that the ancestral brain-cells 
are liable to revive, like a grain of mummy-wheat in the 
soil of Ohio ; that some sensitive persons can walk 
through these galleries of another person as a somnam- 
bulist takes his unconscious tour on the ridge-pole of a 
house ; that the listeners can be astonished to find their 
own buried latencies and memories recalled, with 
appropriate names and sceneries, and striking coinci- 
dences ; and that there is a subtle connection of the 
brain with people and neighborhoods that sometimes 
transcends geography, and receives from distances 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 25 

impressions that do not arrive by any ordinary express. 
The witch of Endor may raise the phantom of Samuel 
out of the brain which the doting Saul brings to the 
interview. The solitary brain, without the witch, and 
without the expense of a fee, has many a time raised 
the dead into objectiveness and overwhelming prom- 
inence. When the cross-questioning begins, we dis- 
cover that nothing but the brain is present and alive. 

The general drift of all natural things towards a 
theory of natural uniformity accumulates the proba- 
bility against any fault or dislocation like this assumed 
one of spiritual agency. The theory that can absorb 
the greatest number of facts, and persist in doing so, 
generation after generation, through all changes of 
opinion and of detail, is the one that must rule all 
observation. The occult facts do not like to meet this 
theory, and have lately slipped down a back alley, 
expecting to meet there the ravishing Thisbe of the 
preternatural, as they cry, " I see a voice ; now will I 
to the chink." When the back-alley turns out to be a 
blind lane, in spite of its obscure attractiveness, we 
shall hear them objurgate, " O wicked wall, through 
whom I see no bliss ! " The occult facts will helplessly 
huddle there awhile, then, returning to the high-road, 
be taken up by the natural order and restored to their 
relatives. 

The u more things in heaven and earth " are the very 
things we need to have brought in as fast as possible, 
to keep up a constant confirmation of the impossibility y' 
of getting old miracles accredited or working new ones. 
As fast and as far as we know any thing, the whole 
drift sets against them. 

2 



26 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Piazzi Smith, the devout astronomer, is mad enough 
to propose the divine inspiration to solve the mystery 
of the Great Pyramid." He finds the dry and linear 
measures of the Egyptians preserved within it, and is 
astonished to notice how nearly they anticipated those 
of England. The divine immanence, through the 
natural processes of the mind, does not seem to him 
competent to have invented the " sacred British inch," 
or the dry measure of the Nilotic people. God must 
make a special incursion, and betimes too, before a 
yard of tape or a bushel of malt can be delivered to 
modern unbelievers. 

The very channels which the astronomer explored 
were long ago discovered by the Arabs, who put in at 
a small hole of the rubbish a cat, which quickly 
threaded the mystic interior after her kittens at the 
other aperture, and came to daylight at the true 
entrance. Any common thing that runs about after 
its own kind will betray the direction of the invisible. 
For the greater number of natural facts must always 
be the forerunners of the scientific mind. 

Dr. Bushnell, searching among our mental opera- 
tions for some element that corresponds to his idea of 
the supernatural, finds it in every free act of ours, the 
choice of truth, the preference for good against the 
stronger motive that inclines to evil. When we act 
from passion we are natural, when we act from choice 
we are supernatural. He thinks this element of free- 
dom comes into human nature like a new cause that 
was not before in the world. Here is a confusion that 
arises from the prestige attached to the scriptural con- 
trast of the natural with the spiritual man. Paul's 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 27 

antithesis points to a change in a man's quality, but 
not necessarily in the natural laws which produce it. 
When a man chooses the good, he is simply becoming 
the man he was organized to be ; and he does it by 
means of the laws of his organization. In this sense 
the natural and the spiritual cannot be distinct. There 
is no intrusion of a new cause that was not before in 
the world. The waking of his will is no more super- 
natural than the waking of his body in the morning. 
If he burns off his underbrush, his oaks and maples 
germinate. As w T ell might fermentation and defecation 
be termed supernatural. 

The true mental method, then, is Antisupernatural- 
ism. But this is decried as a negation. Let us rise 
from this, it is said, into positive affirmation of spirit- 
ual things, and build them with what symmetry the 
mind suggests. We are tired of disbelieving ; our 
souls feel as jaded as the one sailor in a gang who 
should push his capstan bar against all the rest. Let 
us take the real motion, and get under weigh. Some 
radical thinkers are disposed to lend an ear to this 
complaint about the destructive tendency of antisuper- 
naturalism. They cry, Let us revert to central things ; 
let us collect all constructive truths and attributes. 
Foremost of constructive truths is the method of the 
divine mind, as it is seen in all orders, creatures, 
knowledges. Why say it is destructive? Here's a 
whole forenoon travelling westward, and waking up 
the scorn of every meridian at the slur upon its fidelity. 
Method is organic, and it builds. It necessarily denies 
all the miraculous mythologies of the past and present, 
as the new astronomy denies the Ptolemaic epicycles, 



28 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

which were once the belief of all mankind. It has 
taken the sun and moon, and the influences of all the 
planets, to expunge them from the science of the world. 
But what was it that denied them ? The positive truth, 
of the natural order of the heavens. The epicycles 
were the destructives ; they upset all planetary order, 
because they went into artificial combination against it ; 
they were at best a cumbersome expedient to represent 
the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies, and as 
long as men's minds followed the complicated round, 
they did not walk with God. The radical thinker must 
make the anti supernatural method the main-spring of 
his whole activity. It must set in motion all his gifts, 
from perception to the subtlest report of feeling and 
imagination. It rs the co-ordinating principle of his 
whole intelligence, because it is the supernature of the 
natural world. 

What are some of the benefits of this mental method ? 
If it represents the divine harmony, we shall expect 
to see truthful and desirable results in the whole moral 
and spiritual constitution. We restore health to all our 
faculties when we recur to the normal relations that 
exist between the mind and the world ; the very ges- 
ture is the first appeal of the sick man to those habits 
of air, exercise and regularity, which refresh a jaded 
system. The intellect pulls the stroke oar among the 
divine crew whose forces mark the rhythm that spreads 
on all sides into the obscurest inlets of nature. 

It is a great benefit to emancipate a mind from the 
habit of limping after its own truths on the crutch of 
mythological authority, and to show its relation of res- 
pect to the past on the ground that it blossomed with 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 



2 9 



the same moral law that beautifies the present ; to 
teach the natural permanence, continuity and uniform- 
ity of all spiritual truths, whether they result from our 
accumulated sensations, or from an intuitional ability, 
or whether the latter derives them from the totality of 
the former. A right mental method gives them all the 
advantage of science. No theology can juggle .with 
them or trade in them, either with heaven or hell to boot. 
The man sees that 7ie is what he may expect. It puts 
a stop to all superstitious aspirations for a marvellous 
inburst of power to influence, convert or save. The 
tide is always moulded by the configuration of the 
shore ; it reaches every man where he stands, as it does 
all forms of things in the world that are fashioned 
while they stay it. The right mental method keeps 
every man cool and safe in the dark, like the healthy 
child who goes up the dim winding staircase to its 
slumber, having gone up so often in the noontime that 
the night shineth like the day. Method does not 
tremble on the verge of hysterics, dreading some 
epiphany besides the day ; nor will it hanker secretly 
for assignations carried on mid the penumbra of Na- 
ture, where still some facts lie in half light : they will 
become familiar enough in the gradual spreading of the 
morn, whose broad laugh will expose their secret par- 
amours. The whole moral system becomes toned by 
regular and even expectation when the mind is con- 
tent with the tendency of the greater number of phe- 
nomena, and expects that it will include them all. 

The true method brings God to man through all the 
legitimate channels of knowledge, deduction, emotion, 
and human love. They are subject to a continuous 



30 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

agency, which cannot be stimulated to alter the nature 
and number of its facts. All the real members of a 
finite soul learn their exercise as God shall make the 
competent gestures. There is honest bread for each. 
The dragon which guarded golden apples is discovered 
to be God's aversion to extraordinary expectations ; and 
the garden of the Hesperides is now well laid down to 
fodder and esculents. Each human faculty is a house- 
hold that must expect its providence by its own road, 
as the butcher and milkman arrive by theirs, and not as 
peculiar favor down the chimney into the pot by pre- 
ternatural gymnastics. The laws of life, health, pain 
and death, the consciousness of the avoidable and the 
unavoidable, will be taken out of the region of theo- 
logical surmising, and all men will grow hilarious with 
the conviction that God continues to be sane. The 
steadfast and sanguine frame, in which heaven is all the 
time, will disconcert our conceited effort to force it into 
special providences and means of extra grace. The 
pulpit orator, ashamed to pray for them any longer,, 
will probably turn his attention to the fact that all men 
have what they get, and he will stimulate their hopes 
by the knowledge of the laws that prevail in the house- 
keeping of God. The sailor straining at the recusant 
capstan bar, who keeps the anchor in the mud, is 
Supernaturalism . 

What recesses of the human soul cannot be reached 
by the even tide of God ? Its refreshment slides up 
from gift to gift, and tosses its spray into the face of 
imagination, and lies deep around the rooted senses on 
which men stand to see their hope of immortality and 
consciousness of the divine presence reflected in it. If 



RIGHT MENTAL METHOD. 3 1 

it ebbs, we recollect the image and yearn for the diur- 
nal freshness. It lifts us, with the rest of Nature, and 
all things find themselves blithely afloat. Nice obser- 
vation of an insect's embryo, warm enthusiasm for 
the moral law, the tenderness that seeks its human 
kind, and the ecstasy that claims kinship with the 
invisible order, — the whole of the soul is carried round 
with the planets, and rolls into the orderly influence of 
all the heavenly lights : not one faculty can lag behind, 
or be dropped out of this mental unity. Nothing truly 
precious swims helplessly in the great wake of God's 
clear method, but every part of the man can be, and, 
therefore, strives to be, abreast of the other. The 
mountains follow the earth, the air has clasped the 
mountains, and daylight and starlight stream forward 
entangled in the air. Clutching for dear life to each 
other, all solid and tenuous things describe the great, 
invariable motion, and God is in the manifoldness, 
drenching it with uniformity. 



II. 

AMERICA'S DEBT. 

IF any person inclines to say that America may 
receive the distinction of a Religion whose peculi 
arities will belong to the wants and characters of the 
country, he is told that Religion is a fixed body of ideas, 
or a tendency that is independent of time and place, is 
at home in all climates and outlives them all, and 
remains essential, while worship and sacramental cus- 
toms alone are modified. Then if you ask for a state- 
ment of this tendency, or what these fixed ideas are 
which create Religion, you get as many answers as 
there are denominations. But all these answers, the 
most liberal as well as the most conservative, agree in 
one point — to affirm that there can be no Religion 
where there is not something to mediate between man 
and God. Therefore, the assumption is, a religion for 
America must conform to this universal necessity, and 
nothing in mixture of race, in physical situation or in 
social and political ideas can select her from mankind, 
to recommend some peculiarity, or to detach religion 
from its general dependence upon mediatorship. 

And we are asked to notice that the human mind has 
been occupied for several thousand years with this idea, 



AMERICA S DEBT. 33 

which began in the cruellest forms of sacrifice, to reach 
at length, through many stages of intellectual improve- 
ment, the feeling that men are united to God rationally 
by the intervening agency of some sovereign person's 
nature and character. God need no longer be flattered 
nor deprecated ; no human heart held dripping toward 
the sky can do aught but confirm divine aversion, and 
no substitution of one heart can satisfy infinite justice, 
nor fill with its blood the interval between earth and 
heaven. But the most liberal thinkers still try to save 
something from this disintegrated doctrine of sacrifice. 
They cling to this : that there is no way of getting over 
■ from man to God till one great heart bridges the chasm, 
and pulsates with the thronging of a myriad feet that 
carry on commerce between the finite and the infinite. 
It is said to be another case of American conceit and 
crudeness, when the Atlantic is expected to interrupt 
this development of humanity. Can three thousand 
miles of salt water break this dyke of life, which so 
many generations have builded with their thought and 
feeling? It has its roots far down in the rubbish which 
savages threw in to sprawl, dark and unsightly, on the 
bottom of life's mystery : their dread of Nature, their 
suspicions of the invisible, their frantic bribes of inno- 
cent blood, their whole cowering barbarism. Upon 
this chance heap went cleaner substitutes of offering 
and property in every form ; any thing to help get man's 
head above water, towards that glimmer of the light 
and air. Schemes, dogmas and ecclesiastical furniture 
went next, the lighter rubbish of the mind ; but the 
whole pile is justified clear through from the base up- 
ward by the one feeling that man must get to God : 



34 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

something must intervene to plant the feet upon, some- 
thing must mediate. It was surmised that all this 
work must be in the right direction, because the 
downward pressure was diminishing, and more light 
came to envelop the endeavor. At length the path 
emerges, and the sun shines so clear, that men are 
dazzled into presuming that God has been all the time 
descending in exact deference to every stage of man's 
upbuilding. This human struggle has been a divine 
travail towards an incarnation. Let men see it as they 
stand at length firmly above the waves. Here it is, the 
great Person, both divine and human : he will answer 
all questions, meet all wants. Without him man is not* 
a child and God is not a father. Both parties are non- 
plussed for want of a bridge. There can be no other 
communication. The Atlantic cannot be austere 
enough to deter the logic of history from colonizing a 
new world. The American is not independent of it. 
He must import it with the multiplication table and the 
rule of* three. Trading and Religion cannot migrate 
out of the universal laws and exigencies. It is only 
some destructive radical's conceit that a new country 
offers to Yankee enterprise a chance to invent director 
and cheaper routes to God. 

It is true that rapid prosperity has been surprised 
into the indulgence of a flippant tone, which gratifies 
any foreign observer whose object is to strengthen his 
own patriotism by counting our defects. He will have 
no difficulty in deprecating a contemptuous sciolism 
which infects our thinking, business, and amusements. 
It seems that the most successful citizens rectify the 
estimate of the earth's age by the date of their nativity. 



AMERICA S DEBT. 35 

At least they admit no chronological periods of im- 
portance previous to the settlement of the country. 
This is partly a fault of position. Old ties, old lan- 
guages, festivals and customs, were surrendered by a 
few emigrants, whose successors undertake at a disad- 
vantage the creation of new forms, while they betray 
that the struggle for life has made them impatient. 
There is a culture of fine arts and letters, by no means 
of the philological kind, that mitigates the attacks of 
an untoward climate upon the nerves, and touches the 
temper with mansuetude. The full pocket is slapped 
less loudly, and nobler fashions of life and pleasure 
levy toll upon it. Such an influence unfortunately does 
not yet prevail where the people have been driven to 
fight for a position in which the first necessities of 
existence can be obtained. The effort has made them 
curt in their depreciation of arts that seem to them 
superfluous. And it even threatens to become a prin- 
ciple of the practical education which the town fur- 
nishes to native born and emigrant. At least one 
singing-book that we have seen, used by some common 
schools, expresses it with unshaken sincerity and con- 
fidence : — 

" Long ago, long ago 
Under Grecian rule, 

They could not raise one spelling-book, 

To teach a boy at school. 

Dark day ! Iron age ! 

Better times we see : 

And the youth of classic fame 

Were not so blest as we. 

Shout, Shout! all the boys, 
Raise the song again, — 



$6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

We are stronger than the Greeks, 
And we '11 be wiser men ; " &c* 

That famous schoolmaster, Tyrtseus, whose soul 
set Grecian sinew to the key of freedom, taught men 
to fight better than they knew, and with a longer 
breath ; for they served these American occasions 
which we use for a license to forget with such hilarious 
satisfaction. Let some one infuse into our primary 
rhymes a sense of the benefit which battling civiliza- 
tions have done to America, as they advanced to strains 
of their moment's enthusiasm, to prepare her way. 

There is a sweet proverb in the Talmud that " The 
world is only saved by the breath of the school-chil- 
dren." But youth itself is lost when some reverence 
for the old youth that fostered it is not felt coming from 
its lips. 

But when it is said, we inherit from the past a 
human need of mediatorship, that anticipates the first 
gesture which Religion can ever make here, and de- 
cides the sources and supply of spiritual truth for 
America, an inference is drawn from the past which 
converts it from a teacher into a tyrant, and repeats the 
sorrowful mistake of all theologies. 

I have yet to meet the man, however radical and 
sceptical, who will deny that we depend upon the past. 
It is a cheap device of the newspapers to represent a 
radical thinker, axe in hand, furiously laying about 
. him in the underbrush, and levelling with indiscrimi- 
nate stroke the weeds that spindled up in a week, and 

* This stupendous paean is sung to the tune of " Nellie 
Bly." 



America's debt. 37 

the close-grained trees that envelop with their bark 
a thousand years. Any thing that has a root is 
supposed to be predestined fuel for the radical's 
crackling fire. The popular fancy constructs him 
toasting his thin extremities, and thawing out bloodless 
veins, at a blaze of cedars of Lebanon and the product 
of extensive clearings of the Mount of Olives. Into 
this costly smoke, fed with cinnamon and sandal- wood, 
perfumed with myrrh and frankincense that were trib- 
utes of Eastern wisdom to the eternal child of truth, 
he throws the bonds which mankind has given to Life, 
Death and Immortality, and is amused to watch the 
bankruptcy curling up the chimney. But if the public 
chose, it might- observe the modern thinker walking in 
the shade of the primeval trees that still grapple with 
the breasts of earth, and tasting gratefully their fruits. 
Would it avail to insist upon this? Is it ever worth 
while for a man formally to deny that he believes twice 
two to be a minus quantity? It ought to be impos- 
sible to find anybody who suspects him of believing it. 

The sower, who goes forth to sow his seed, looks 
straight before him, and scatters his germs into the 
centuries that lie beneath his feet. Who, indeed, 
denies the Past so effectively as the conservative who 
twists his neck with ogling her over his shoulder, while 
his feet, no longer vision-guided, stumble on their way 
to the day's errand? The Past is not a mummy-pit 
where a man rummaging for ornaments gets stifled 
with the dust of countless dead people. But it is the 
planet's made soil. The primeval oceans deliberated 
over it, and left a deposit of their minute forms of life. 
The mammoth rivers tore the hill-sides with white 



38 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

tusks, and ran down to estuaries with silt that tells 
how long they had been browsing. The glacier slipped 
over the whole scene, noiseless as thought, and as 
well-freighted. Its blue share both ploughed and 
sowed. And on the surface gained by this extensive 
labor of epochs, the skies shed their rain and succes- 
sive races their blood. Now a man plants a slip of a 
geranium bush in several million years of tillage and 
top-dressing. Does he think he has got an inch or two 
of yesterday in his trowel ? It is so heavy that, if he 
only knew it, he would drop it as if he saw it was a 
mountain. That young man's laurel has the pink of 
all the Csesars' cheeks glistening through its morning's 
dew. A crown of thorns is woven for these foreheads 
of ours out of more Gethsemanes than history had 
time to reckon. A few turns of the spade anywhere 
will refute the nervous hurry of these second-hands on 
the face of our time, for there are places where a day 
laborer can pitch a century into his cart in a forenoon, 
and wheel it off to mend a hole in the highway. 

During some explorations which were lately made 
upon the coast of Crete, the recent tokens of the Turk 
were first thrown aside, to uncover those of the Vene- 
tian, beneath which lay successively the forgotten years 
of Greek, Phoenician andPelasgic cities, till a few stone 
relics of the cave-dwellers, tossed out undermost of 
all, lay on the beach for the tide' to wet. It once slid 
up to flatter the feet of men who dropped their brine 
into it before earth learned the fashion of counting 
human tears. Upon what a concrete we stand : our 
minute's opportunity secured by several oblivions ! 
But they are not in fact forgotten, for we recognize 



AMERICA S DEBT. 3Q 

them whenever honor and truth ask for seats at our 
fireside. These guests have been travelling to keep 
their appointment with us ever since the world's sur- 
face had pathways. Now the conscience passes to and 
fro by broad routes that were first nothing but the 
channel of some barbarian's tear. When that little 
furrow set out to mark some plain dictates of right 
and wrong, that might reclaim the ferocious uncertain- 
ties and fence them with human security and comfort, 
enclosed in which early smiles might spring to attract 
heaven's sunshine, the colonization of six and thirty 
States with liberty was begun. 

When we mention the tears which have been extorted 
by the conscience in its agonizing to set free Truth and 
win Religion by it, we are reminded of a function of 
the Past that is little understood. Perhaps we are too 
young and prosperous to observe that mankind has 
been shedding tears that we may taste our truth well 
filtered. But it is so. The most cheerful action is as 
pathetic as the most tragic : for its easy movement, 
that charms the beholders, is a hint to them of genera- 
tions of men and women put on the rack till the sweet 
confession was gathered at their dying lips. All the 
torture has been left behind in the distorted limbs. We 
cannot be honest in our friendships and business, 01 
exchange these new amenities of living, and conspire 
to put the rights of man in a safe place, at a less ex- 
pense than the perils and longings of all the Pasi. 

" For a tear is an intellectual thing, 
And a sigh is the sword of an angel king, 
And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe 
Is an arrow from the Almighty bow." 



4-0 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

The best adorer that the Past retains is not the con- 
servative who thinks that an old truth must be a 
seasoned one, but the liberal who perceives that the 
new truth is a filtered one. The conservative esteems 
the crudeness that has age upon it ; the liberal prefers 
the age that runs through crudeness to a limpid drop. 
He does not care to taste at the previous stages, not 
even at the one before the last. But he venerates the 
mighty ferment of Nature, and never forgets that 
human blood and tears were thrown in to clarify the 
bumpers of Godhood that he tosses down. 

He claims and clings to every name that is expres- 
sive of past excellence : to the name of that great soul 
who has been elected Mediator by Christendom, and 
thrust into an office that only ill-conceived texts can 
arrogate for him. All the Jewish assumptions of this 
kind that he ever made were contradicted by the 
simplicity of his spiritual life, as it relied upon the 
private instinct of each soul to find its God at hand. 
Whatever is beautiful in the morals and piety which 
make his character so impressive to the memory, onlv 
serves to show how the page is disfigured by the doc- 
trines of Christship ; and we shrink from admitting 
that he could have entertained them. We perceive 
that they are nothing but verbal gestures that strive in 
vain to limit and direct his soul's great movement, by 
which he anticipated all official station and lent his per- 
sonal vitality to the cause of mankind. He permitted 
God to become incarnate, and so he wins the suprem- 
acy of a place by the side of all other men, in whom 
the same mystery is perpetually enacted. 

At one time there were as many pieces of the true 



AMERICAS DEBT. 41 

cross, well authenticated, as would suffice to build a 
meeting house ; but all crucified men have preferred 
to touch the relic of his sympathy and brotherly love. 
And that we have inherited, emphasized, enlarged, 
organized, and translated into definite actions. Mod- 
ern blood hastens to repair wounds and ghastly lacer- 
ations ; to heal that thrust in the side of humanity, 
from which a sacred stream continually flows. White 
lips languish on crosses close at hand, but they do not 
summon a distant redeemer. And the modern thinker 
may wait at the foot of the old cross, with all the 
heart of that cluster of women, till the head droops 
in the kind swoon which takes that martyr off to rest, 
like a nurse bearing an infant to its mother ; but 
instead of trying to save his soul by getting that death 
imputed to him, he notes the last gesture, turns it to 
confidence and leaves the place : he has no time to 
linger around a dying moment, and no care to fancy 
that it has a mysterious connection with his life. His 
own head is alive with doubt, dismay, unsatisfied 
desires, the crucial moments of existence. Has God 
forsaken him? He lays his head directly upon the 
bosom of God, with nothing intermediate, not the 
most beloved pulse, not the insinuation of the most 
sacred memory to divide and distract the closeness of 
heaven. He heard the mob of passions and problems 
shouting, u Let him save himself" — and he does. If 
the prophets and martyrs have left one legacy to 
America, it is that (not so much legacy as privilege) 
of prophesying and suffering by direct contact with 
God. Nothing but that directness ever did or ever 
can draw martyrdom down while rising to prophecv 



42 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Ransack history to see if you can find any other medi- 
atorship than the example of the great souls who 
spurned mediators, and rushed into divineness all 
alone. Out of the wine-press which they trod alone 
drips for us the vintage of direct appeal to the imme- 
diate God. We catch it in the cup of our knowledge 
and attainment, mere earthen-ware, perhaps, plain 
to ugliness, or perhaps sumptuously embossed and 
ornamented, and carved by lines that thousands of 
years have fondly hung over, meditating and correct- 
ing ; it is a relic of the past, but the drink is the 
present inspiration : our own private and incessant 
God fills it to the brim. Plato and Socrates are still 
extant in the chiselling ; our lips feel kindred rubies 
from the East clustering to meet them ; a world's 
midnight thinking has gone into that least curve to 
the greatest content, a world's noonday acting has fash 
ioned its foot : shall we venture to say that the cross 
of Jesus is with other crosses in the stem ? Yes : but 
the drink, the rapture that sends our veins heaven 
high, the mouthful, the soulful — that is God with us, 
as He was with those before. 

And see how America has inherited from the past 
a material condition and a moral temper of self-help, 
which provide all the circumstances that correspond 
to this independent gesture of Religion. We still 
have priests, bishops, and overseers of souls, with 
functions which a mature person finds superfluous : 
yet the colonizing of a new world meant that an ex- 
periment should be tried of a world without priest- 
craft, on a continent where every man could have reli- 
gion like air, gratis, by lifting his window, or turning 



AMERICA S DEBT. 43 

the handle of his door. As wealth makes our cities 
impatient of frugality and simple ways, we begin to 
recollect that there are cathedrals in the old world : 
architects import the details of York, Westminster, 
and Strasburg, and furnish them to building commit- 
tees who want to run up a costly box of a plaything, 
and a corresponding bill. Westminster's lines and 
arches, which spring grandly to cover a space that a 
small city might occupy, are pinched down to the 
capacity of a thousand people ; the great rose windows 
shrink to knot-holes ; the glass resents a plain, straight- 
forward daylight, and, in short, the dim religiousness 
sets in. Still, a cathedral would have swamped the 
Mayflower, and they took great pains to keep it out 
of the hold ; and the grim, austere land was settled 
and subdued without the aesthetic influences of stained 
glass and ogive lines. The polity of Plymouth Rock 
was anti-liturgical. Everybody was in the open 
weather in summer and winter. Now some of us are 
getting catarrhal, and run to shelter out of the sincere 
climate of the Republic. Nevertheless, our health is 
promoted by ventilation and the outside of buildings ; 
and there is no country in the world where such a 
broad sheet of sunshine lies over one political area. 
It invites us to run to and fro to flowers and labor in 
its robust actinic ray. Every brain comes into God's 
weather furnished with its own roof. When souls 
discover that vaulted aisles bleach instead of protect- 
ing them, they prefer to be dipped in a horizon full of 
warmth, and drenched at every sense and pore with 
divine virility. 

Universal suffrage is not yet the symbol of each 



44 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

man's private worth, but only of his responsibility to 
be worthy. It ought to notify that he has an income 
not appraised by the assessor ; namely, that he is a 
moral and spiritual person, too costly for the purses 
of cliques and oligarchies ; never so much the ally 
of truth as when he stands alone. He is set down 
in these empires of states where nobody can jostle 
him : he begins to be effective when he is not welded 
in a crowd. It is true, parties have their whippers-in, 
and we are threatened with the drill-master in the 
best of causes ; but a continent that is too large for 
fencing suggests to the citizens constant sallies and 
excursions, it being plainly the genius of the place 
to preserve individualism. That asserts itself from 
Boston, through Utah to the Golden Gate, in all the 
excesses and virtues of an ambitious society. Shall 
we tame it by lassoing and corraling all the indi- 
viduals? No, but rather by leaving each man free to 
catch himself. This is a work of time, but any the- 
ory of government, society or religion, that undertakes 
to interfere with it in disgust or alarm, in high-bred 
contempt for inconveniences, is out of date, and can- 
not, therefore, make the new movement of the spirit- 
ual nature which is to free religion from mediatorship. 
But it is objected that no new movement can de- 
velop any thing new out of the religious elements of 
human nature which have furnished belief and moral 
behavior to all the countries of the earth. It is said 
that religion is derived from primitive truths imbedded 
in the substance of the soul ; some of them are moral 
truths, and some of them express the relation which 
the creature sustains to the Creator. America must 



AMERICA S DEBT. 45 

accept these universal necessities. She cannot im- 
provise a new digestive apparatus, with food to cor- 
respond, such as no race of men has yet tasted. She 
can emancipate mankind from every thing but its 
organization. That she must accept, else emancipa- 
tion itself has no continuance. And it is vitally de- 
pendent upon religious truths. Can America set up 
housekeeping without a practice of the divine economy 
of the Beatitudes? Can she afford to do without a 
God, or to overlook the retributive agency of evil? 
Certainly not. These are powerful objects towards 
which the country must put forth its characteristic 
strength. They can only be acquired by the entirely 
original, unbiased efforts of each individual, independ 
ent of his memory of the past. Nothing is fit to 
drink but the water which you draw from your own 
well freshly every morning. The Beatitudes were 
drawn in that way, and quenched one man's thirst. 
Did the other people cease to be dry while they were 
looking on to see him drink? It might be plain to 
them that the draught was refreshing ; they might 
extol it with parched lips, and cry, " Give me to 
drink ! " But if a man who draws his own Beatitudes 
makes a proposition to furnish other parties, he can 
only be understood to say to them : " There is an ever- 
lasting well of water in you ; don't try to let your 
bucket down into me ; besides, I go away ; but men 
will be thirsty everywhere, and there will be water 
everywhere. Will it quench thirst for people to re- 
member adoringly that I drew my own water, and 
how good it was ? " For a beatitude is not revealed 
until it is personally experienced 



46 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

There is a popular trick of remembering the impres- 
sive accounts of men in India, Greece and Judea, 
who had an instinct for water, and knew where it lay 
hid beneath those fervent skies. And this is called 
Religion. Men collect in churches, and lay hold of 
some kind of mediatorial tackle, and haul at it while 
the preacher gives the time, encouraging them with 
descriptions of what he knows they will bring up. 
But what is it when it arrives at the surface ? Why, 
it is just what they let down, a mediating bucket full 
of texts. The water is not there, not even the per- 
son is there whose soul was a well-mouth communi- 
cating with the water. But it lies underneath the 
whole earth's crust ; and these other living persons 
who have rigged this derrick that cranes across to 
Judea might hear it trickling under their feet, or be 
apprised of its presence by the immediate divining of 
their thirst. 

The reason why so many moral battles have to be 
fought afresh, and the new causes of righteousness are 
slow to enlist their natural allies, is because the popu- 
lar religion is so largely made up of recalling the 
nature of Jesus ; holding his words heaven-distant, at 
the tongue's end ; clinging for justification to the gar- 
ment stained with 'his blood ; trying to make a ladder 
of his cross. Men climb to the top of that, and are 
no nearer human rights and sanities than they were 
before. It is just high enough to give the churches an 
outlook over people's heads. They can " see Jerusa- 
lem and Madagascar ; " entranced, they cry hush to 
the pother that enslaving iniquities make beneath 
them. Lately these true believers remained perched 



AMERICA S DEBT. 47 

up there so long, enjoying the beatific prospect, that 
half a million men got nailed to as many fresh crosses 
at the head of graves where slavery lies buried. Then 
they come down and vote it magnificent. But they 
are soon up again. It is a wasteful and slovenly kind 
of religion, this pulling at the skirts of a mediator. 
America has lost too much time in that way already, 
and paid roundly for absence of mind. 

Put it to common sense, then, if the proposition to 
emancipate America from this hectoring stepmother of 
tradition into the immediate liberty of the sons of God, 
be not a constructive one. It is so, if the mission of 
Truth be to organize and save by the divineness of the 
instant and not of the memory. The book is not yet 
printed that provides for the emergencies of our future. 
There are hundreds of books, reverend with age, that 
imply them, but nothing is so futile as implication. It 
can only be read clearly by means of such a fresh 
inspiration of duty and courage as makes the reading 
superfluous. 

America is an opportunity to make a Religion out 
of the sacredness of the individual. She did not 
invent the idea, for it has been implied through the 
successive stages of knowledge and civilization. It 
was implied when an old cave-dweller succeeded in 
making a stone lance-head that would kill a mammoth. 
When God invented the human race, and selected the 
first men out of animalism and set them on precarious 
legs, he implied the sacredness of the creature ; and 
the implication went groping into and through all 
forms of religion and the books that chronicled them. 
The old Buddhist implied America when he made a 



48 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

iight with the Brahman over the doctrine of Caste. 
The Persian implied the superiority of the individual 
over the dark forces of Nature when he called the 
soul out of Ahriman, or the principle of evil, into the 
light of the sun. The Greek framed the proud thought 
in his story of Prometheus freeing man from his de- 
pendency upon the blind fatalities of life. Socrates 
implied it every time he stopped at a carpenter's or 
currier's door, and brought out the man's notions upon 
politics and virtue, to show him how conventional they 
were, and how far below T his own sense of the hand- 
some and proper. The Psalms of David imply citi 
zenship and inalienable rights in every word about 
walking uprightly, working righteousness, and speak- 
ing the truth in the heart ; in all the objurgations of 
the oppressor, the pleas to God to defend the poor 
and fatherless, do justice to the afflicted and needy, 
and deliver them out of the hand of the wicked. The 
same insinuations prolong themselves into the speech 
of Jesus, where they gather meaning from the com- 
mand to stand fast in the truth that maketh free, and 
from the golden rule, which Confucius had already 
promulgated to a nation more liberal than the Jews. 

This republican implication was made more notably 
by Paul than by any other voice in the New Testa- 
ment. Compared with the twelfth chapter of the First 
of Corinthians, for instance, all the fraternal sayings 
of Jesus appear abstract and colorless. They contain 
the brotherhood of man, to be sure, but it is as the 
nebula contains the planets. Paul gave the first round- 
ing touch to that fire-mist of sentiment which has be- 
come solid ground beneath the nineteenth century. 



AMERICA S DEBT. 



49 



He wrote merely to advise a Church to cooperate in 
the display of its spiritual gifts, and he encumbers his 
manly text with allusions to miracles, discerning of 
spirits, and interpretation of tongues. But when he 
says, " By one spirit are we all baptized into one 
body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we 
be bond or free, for the body is not one member but 
many," he seems to be in conference with Jefferson 
and Franklin, proposing his draught towards the basis 
of the Declaration of Independence. Read in that 
light the chapter might astonish Europe, who has had 
it upon her pulpits for centuries, but has not even 
yet introduced equality into the pews. So much for 
the value of truths that are so vaguely implied that an 
afterthought is necessary to liberate their meaning. 
The afterthought is the genuine revelation. 

The abolition of slavery was involved in the state- 
ment made to the disciples : " One is your Master, 
even Christ, and all ye are brethren." But who were 
included by that glittering generality, " all ye " ? Only 
at first the knot of disciples, and, by implication, all 
future followers of the Master. But Onesimus was 
not included so far as he continued to be the chattel 
of a Christian ; and when he was returned to his 
owner, the late campaigns of the American people 
were implied, and not emancipation. Nineteen cen- 
turies bleed to clarify that text, and precipitate its un- 
determined qualities into the rights of individuals. 
That blood has been the really efficacious revelation 
of fraternity, whose rubricated text finds no Bible large 
enough to hold it 

It has been assumed that the modern regard for 

3 



50 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

woman, which involves her gradual release from an- 
tique disabilities, may be directly traced to the golden 
rule, since it enjoins that we must do to men what 
we would prefer that they should do to us. But what 
moral scope and intention were expressed by that 
statement? No more than were when Confucius 
anticipated it. It is not a question of how much 
human equality the present can gather and reflect 
upon it, but of how much it really reflected at the 
time it was uttered. If we can be permitted to ag- 
grandize the old texts by modern experiences, we can 
easily interpret the belief of Jesus in a personal devil, 
and in the possession by demons, into a scientific ac- 
knowledgment of the malign influences of unfortunate 
births, and hysteric, epileptic, and insane conditions. 
/ Professor Maury, the distinguished observer of the 
laws of winds and storms, discovered a forecasting of 
his own theory of the rotatory movement of the cy- 
clone, and of the circular sweep of the storm-bearing 
currents, in the text of Ecclesiastes : " The wind goeth 
toward the South, and turneth about unto the North ; 
it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth 
again according to his circuits." It needed no church 
weathercock to teach as much as that. 

So we can undertake to manage the plain belief of 
Scripture in a second visible coming of a Judge and 
Savior, and let it down softly into the representation 
that Jesus comes by development of spiritual truth. 
But these are the fraudulent accommodations of occu- 
pants of modern pulpits, who try desperately to save 
at once the old text and their common sense. One of 
the two must be surrendered ; for the point is, that the 



AMERICAS DEBT. 5 I 

old texts meant another thing to the utterers and hear- 
ers, who never anticipated this modern jugglery which 
undertakes to spiritualize their delusive statements ; 
they meant merely what they said, and clung to it till 
reality outfaced them, and would not have felt indebted 
to any one who should insist that they meant some- 
thing different. 

If we mean something different, let us express it in 
texts of our own, and not attempt to procure spurious 
authority for our meaning, by extorting it from the lips 
of men who held obsolete views of nature, life, and 
society. 

When the world-old golden rule was reaffirmed by 
Jesus, it carried only his feeling that men must always 
offer the treatment that they prefer to receive. But, so 
far as the political, legal, or social equality of women 
is concerned, the word " men" expressed the ordinary 
intention of the age, as the word " citizen" does in our 
constitution ; it never entered the mind of the repro- 
ducer of that primitive natural preference for fair-deal- 
ing, that it should include the emancipation of woman. 
It nowhere appears that the idea had dawned upon 
his moral consciousness. 

There are traces, on the contrary, that Jesus shared 
the ordinary oriental feeling upon the relation of women 
to men. He treated his favorites with consideration, 
perhaps with tenderness ; and what man ever did less? 
But he betrayed the same spirit which appears in the 
Epistles of Paul, who derived it from his own position 
in race and history, and needed not to catch it by in- 
fection. We detect, in the interview with Mary and 
Martha, all the pleased absorption of a modern mysta- 



52 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

gogue who has an adoring woman for a listener, while 
the householder and elder sister overheats herself in 
the kitchen that he and his retinue may be fitly enter- 
tained. The most inveterate vegetarian and ascetic 
will confess that more than one thing is needful in 
housekeeping. Even the New Testament represents 
that the Son of Man came eating and drinking, as 
probably did his disciples ; and there are hints that they 
were not averse from being entertained. If Mary had 
been dismissed to help her sister, a lesson in the golden 
rule would have been administered, and both of them 
might then have passed precious hours at his feet. 
The good part to choose must be found in manly and 
womanly fidelity to all reasonable service. Christian- 
ity neither emphasizes the equality of woman within 
her own sex, nor her right to all the opportunities she 
may decide to claim. 

It was not till Christianity found Greek refinement 
on its way to the West, and met there the superior 
reverence for woman among the Teutonic races, that 
Europe began to entertain a better opinion. The lit- 
eralist has been always right in maintaining that hu- 
man slavery and the subjection of woman can be clearly 
vindicated by the text and practice of the Bible. 

The moral sense declares, " I have heard that it hath 
been said by Paul of olden time, but I say a more 
excellent thing." We reject his half-theological, half- 
animal theory of marriage, and resist his contempt- 
uous denial of woman's personal independence in the 
church ; and then how much else comes tumbling to 
the ground ! Woman recovers rights of person, of 
property, of the widest education (such as the ancient 



America's debt. 53 

Lesbian school anticipated), of independent livelihood, 
and of careers in every direction corresponding to ca- 
pacity. Where is all this implied in the New Tes- 
tament? Its spirit of humanity may claim direct 
paternity for all these generous schemes of the mod- 
ern conscience, when the doctrine of particles of mat- 
ter, maintained by the Egyptians and by Democritus, 
can prove to be the father of the atomistic theory of 
Dalton. He reveals and organizes, gives law and nu- 
merical ratio, to the fumbling abstraction with which 
the ancients inaugurated the career of this new sci- 
ence. 

Centuries of housekeeping, of improving politics, 
ameliorated races, the emergence of a middle class, 
the development of labor, machinery, motive powers, 
of popular reading and writing, at length make the 
implication of equal rights, always latent in the con- 
science, emphatic, directly put, and formidable. It 
was better conceived and handled by Buddhism than 
by the texts of the New Testament. But there is no 
revelation till an act takes the place of uncommitted 
sentiment. 

The moral sense has fashioned the coast-lines and 
inlets that become the configuration of every age ; but 
it has an exacting and fastidious ear. It listens at its 
work, and never appears to be content with the rote 
of the shore it has made. It seems to be unreliable 
and destructive, as it crumbles old cliffs and submerges 
districts to encroach upon habitable soil ; but it only 
prepares fresh conveniences. It will not do for an 
apostle to tie his boat at the old water-mark, if he 
prefers to be afloat and in commerce with mankind. 



^4 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

The advancing conscience stands deep above the spot 
where he rocked lazily at the pier which he reached 
with so much labor. The tide is only dangerous when 
it becomes stagnant, and its waifs and strays rot upon 
the beach, and spread through the neighborhood infec- 
tion instead of hardiness. 

The explicitness of old Scriptures is an imputation 
of the modern sense. All of them latently presume 
the honor of the human nature out of which they 
flowed ; but when the time is ripe for redeeming 
these fine hints, and man waits to act amid concurring 
circumstances, he need not go back to inspire himself 
with implications. He is the sacred individual who 
has been expected. 

If he is, he cannot begin with the idea that Reli- 
gion is a long-seasoned set of statements that comprise 
the spiritual man. He cannot begin to conceive of 
a spiritual man till his inspiration makes him for- 
get his memory. Then he will know that religious 
ideas are not a clique sitting in the mind apart, to 
issue a programme of gestures and proper feelings, 
either with the authority or by the help of some past 
epoch ; but he leaps into Religion with every pulse of 
emotion, pries into it with all his mental curiosity, rec- 
ognizes it in the latest law divulged, honors it by pre- 
serving his health, defends it across the bodies of the 
prostrate poor and miserable, who see in him their 
mediator before the infinite, as he deposits opportunity 
for them with his vote. Six hours after daybreak in 
Europe, the sun touches his eyelids with red borrowed 
from all her battlefields ; that fellow-blood purges his 
visual ray from purblind histories of truths and poli- 



AMERICA S DEBT. 55 

ties not half worked out, of religious systems that only 
contain America by implication, of ascriptions of 
praise, through Jesus Christ, for the failures of a thou- 
sand years. He leaps out of bed, and touches the 
world's opportunity with his feet. His superb disdain 
of the old-fashioned style of dangling after mediators 
rolls between him and the Old World like an Atlantic ; 
but through the depth of it hearts telegraph to him, 
and the instantaneous message puts a girdle of prom- 
ise round the earth. He asks heaven for the day's 
business, worships when he transacts it nobly, and 
binds his soul to eternity by the filaments of every 
nerve he has. They are not transmitting the past say- 
ings of great men ; they are jumping with life to the 
lips, hand, and brain. His soul is not feeding on old 
honey, but the brain-cells receive and work over pollen 
that his morning gathered, as he went about detecting 
justice, charity, and the grace of life, in the act of 
blooming over a whole continent. 



III. . 

THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 

THIS deposit of history which we are disposed to 
call the American Opportunity, is homogeneous 
throughout. Its religion and its polity came down 
together, quite unsuspected by any temporary forms 
or stages of either, and may be found lying together 
on the site they have reached, wherever we penetrate 
beneath sectarian and democratic drift. Individual- 
ism, extricating itself from the governmental jealousy 
of the Old World, asserts itself here in favor of a 
society that shall be more accordant with natural prin- 
ciples. The law of individualism is that human wel- 
fare is secured by the least amount of governing and 
of theologizing : not the selfish welfare of single per- 
sons, but a cooperation more disinterested than any 
place has yet attained. The country must not contain 
a horde of units without any unifying principle, nor 
surrender every temper and grade of culture to a 
quarrel with its neighbor, that would result in the old- 
fashioned interferences of the strongest and the canni- 
est. But the individual finds himself thrown upon his 
own resources of morals and religion, under circum- 
stances that impel him to cultivate thrift, but also 
fraternity. He is his own king and bishop, but his 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 57 

neighbor is one also. If they compete at first, they 
will discover that it is an old centralizing folly, which 
would eventually select some oligarchy of the adroit- 
est competitors to set over their heads, to hamper 
personal freedom instead of defining it. Where the 
person is left most to himself he discovers soonest the 
paths of natural affinity, following which he steps into 
a crowd of men who do not dispute his passage, but 
welcome him. The atoms fly to a natural magnet, 
and cluster in groups, whose order and symmetry pro- 
claim the only relationship that can cohere. 

It is necessary to give some definition of the word 
Individual, that its use may not imply a preference for 
the traits which keep people separated from each 
other, in attitudes of defiance or conceit. And it is 
sometimes assumed by the critics who are hostile to 
our theory of government, whose ink we generously 
reinforce with the gall of our ill-natured habit of in- 
sisting upon private peculiarities and calling them our 
rights, that the Republic is nothing but a vast forc- 
ing-bed of the defects which training and culture 
ought to keep suppressed. Hereditary features become 
exaggerated in a country whose egotism devotes itself 
to securing them an opportunity. Here, it is said, 
every thing that is characteristic finds free play and 
use ; and sects of one member each can attribute relig- 
iousness to the points in which men differ. " I am as 
good as you " means that I am born with some darling 
distinction which I will flatter and sustain ; I am an 
accented syllable which I shall proclaim all alone, and 
its meaning is that I am emancipated from the servile 
conformity of old societies : the country is large on 

3* 



58 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

purpose that crowds may fall apart into units, to per- 
ceive and cultivate their specialities. 

But even this excess of private assertion uncon- 
sciously favors spiritual cooperation. When people 
fall apart as far as possible, and every temperament 
achieves the most violent emphasis, the triviality of 
the result is most clearly discerned. It is one of the 
prime advantages of voluntaryism, though transitional, 
that it exhausts the human possibilities of dissent. 
Let it be settled forever how minute and numerous 
maybe the verbal and accidental differences : let them 
be phrased and stated. As men have come to a mu- 
tual understanding that no two people need look alike, 
that even between twins there reigns some way of 
distinguishing, so they will acquiesce in the identical 
manhood beneath their various mental complexions, 
which fills their veins with one blood of the Spirit, and 
sends the same flush to all cheeks when beautiful and 
noble things are seen. That mantling color of health 
spreads over countless modifications of feature, and 
men are to each other as mirrors, in which their essen- 
tial unity appears, to surprise and ravish. They look 
so handsome to each other that they wonder at their 
past presumption of unlikenesses, and the reconciling 
smile goes round. Then individualism rises to per- 
sonality, and there is an incarnation of divine truth. 

" Mark how one string, sweet husband to another, 

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering : 

Resembling sire and child and happy mother, 

Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing; 

Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one, 

Sing this to thee — * thou single wilt prove none.'" 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 59 , 

The individual is sacred by virtue of this organic 
fellow-feeling that moral and spiritual truth has for 
itself wherever it can be found. It may go masquerad- 
ing in all the costumes of all latitudes, with the intent 
to enjoy clothing suitable to the physical meridian. 
These and manners are disguises, but the real person 
delights in the pursuit of himself, and recognizes his 
essential being however clad. It will be vain for 
denominations to establish tests of fellowship, as soon 
as the individuals appreciate that they have been 
holding each other at arm's-length only as friends do 
who have been long separated, to study each other 
with a jealous gaze, and recover through the aliena- 
tions of time and place the old tokens of affinity. 

The unit will perceive that he is sacred in the inter- 
est of unity, and not because he happens to be one of 
many. Merely as one, he is oppressed by his private 
pretension ; his much lauded freedom of being singu- 
lar becomes a cause of inconvenience to himself and 
others. Everybody who thinks of fortifying his speci- 
ality as an individual, only succeeds in putting himself 
into a state of siege, till, hunger and thirst growing 
intolerable, he destroys his own outworks by a suc- 
cessful sortie, and effects a junction with his real self 
in the open country. 

Thus, when we say that the sacredness of the indi- 
vidual is the basis of American Religion, we accept a 
definition which identifies the person with the elements 
of religion as it is to be described. This religious 
identity is the natural affinity which demands and 
secures the service of each individual for the other, 
and prompts the sacrifices of the republic. 



v 



6o AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Such is the law which will eventually rise superior 
to demagoguism ; to the vulgar ambitions of new rich 
men, and the selfishness that finds its opportunity only 
where it can be sure of permanent protection when- 
ever it is organized. But here the individual inces- 
santly opposes the selfishness of the few in order to 
secure the cooperation of all. For selfishness is a tend- 
ency to be regulated since it cannot be extinguished. 

So each person says : " I want the minimum of 
governing and the maximum of welfare ; as little as 
possible that is official in my politics and my religion. 
Who shall make up my mind about either but myself? 
As soon as interference passes the bound of coopera- 
tion, I find luggage that belongs to other people fast- 
ened to my back. In religion, especially, I can carry 
all that I have within, for nature has decided that 
capacity, but not a rag or a scheme brought over from 
old theological depots of cast off garments. If any 
worshipping is to be done, let my person, in its integ- 
rity of mind and body, be anthem, liturgy, and offer- 
ing." 

We are far enough yet from such a simple adjust- 
ment of the soul with the sincerity of things. Volun- 
taryism is enjoying its fancies and crotchets ; all the 
sects are sitting apart to examine what the grab-bag 
has yielded them. But these gifts are very trivial, for 
theology is a mean provider at its fair ; its object being 
to raise a good deal of money at a little outlay. So 
people play awhile with Orthodox, Baptist, and Uni- 
tarian dolls : make the eyes roll and the limbs gesticu- 
late. The people who represent individualism soon 
get tired, petulantly tear the dolls apart, smile at the 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 6 1 

sawdust and watch-springs, and throw them into the 
rubbish. Indeed, all the people suspect that their own 
souls are contrivances superior to these ; and when 
they are not nursing a doll, you may catch them with 
their arms full of the glorious babe of humanity, 
pressing it close to the universal instinct to recognize 
a Son of God. This rapture passes away ; in fact, 
that babe has heaven in it and weighs somewhat ; for 
daily carrying, a doll may be slung anywhere, while 
the rest of the man attends to the concerns of his fam- 
ily and town. After all, despotism has a better time 
in the meeting-houses than it can have along the 
streets, where any street-organ that touches a heart's 
tune gathers its crowd of Sunday dissidents, who drop 
the current coin, and perhaps the tear. 

But we ought to emphasize the characteristic into 
which the efforts of mankind at self-government have 
been filtered. When it comes to the point in this 
country, and justice applies her test, the sacredness of 
the individual is sure to appear. There is not enough 
tradition left over to smother it. The demagogue may 
point after great numbers of individuals who are gro- 
tesquely clad and favored ; as badly bred but not as 
bitter as himself, — too miserable for that, — as stupid 
but not as obstinate ; as hungry but not as unscrupu- 
lous ; with skin as dark but not as unwashed. He 
can whistle a crowd down the street in pursuit of these 
men, and perhaps persuade it to select some lamp- 
post to make his Anti-Americanism conspicuous. 
But the next time those despised and rejected people 
are seen on the pavement, they are better clad and 
furnished with ideas, and have a bit of paper in their 



62 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

hand, the death-sentence of the demagogue. He had 
sinned against the unwritten law of the land, and 
now it flames in bright letters along every wall. 

If a theologian, wishing to uncoil his paper-barri- 
cade of a creed, would have it safe, let him not do it 
across the road while Liberty is passing to keep her 
appointment with men. Put fences up in meeting- 
houses, turn every pew into a pound, but be careful 
not to block the highway. If a question of the sacred- 
ness of the individual arises, the very pew-holders 
fall into column, and breathe the air of pure and un- 
defiled religion outside. What a pity it is that they 
ever let themselves be impounded again ! Do they 
let their selves be impounded ? How much of church- 
going is mere passing by the sexton of suits of clothes 
to seats? Perhaps the souls exchange winks of recog- 
nition. 

It will be strange if the popular mind, inheriting a 
lively distaste for being over-governed and directed, 
does not also gather from the past a salutary experi- 
ence of the debilitating effect of mediatorial schemes 
of religion. They have not only dragooned men into 
conformity by methods known to despotic states, but 
have inflicted an injury deeper than any that lurked 
behind the walls of the inquisition, by teaching the 
soul to walk with stilts and crutches instead of with 
its own members. People outgrow Mariolatry, invo- 
cation of saints, cringing at the slits of the confessional, 
but it is at the expense of growing into idolatry for 
the Bible, and the superstition that a Redeemer as- 
sumes the function which his mother and the saints 
have vacated. The soul is weakened by learning to 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 63 

lean upon a go-between. It is generally noised about 
by leading minds that they have tried to obtain divine 
truth by more independent methods, and have failed. 
The result of this abject adherence to a single person, 
or to the narrative of a single life, even in its most 
liberal form, is to keep up a piety of reminiscence, 
and throw discredit upon every original mental move- 
ment that is urged by modern circumstances. It is in 
vain that a mediatorial scheme becomes enlightened, 
as it is called : freed, that is, from notions of an atone- 
ment, of some mysterious influence of a sacrifice by 
death, and of some supernatural element in the per- 
son's life and character. Even the miraculous color- 
ing of the narrative is in vain toned down, and held 
subordinate to its spiritual ideas. The most robust 
and intelligent worshipper of a dead Master of reli- 
gious life cannot avoid presuming that he was some- 
thing exceptional ; the solitary perfection and felicity 
of human nature, who still exerts a mystic influence 
upon the soul, and is capable of immediate personal 
communion with the believer. Hearts that cherish 
emotions of regret and admiration begin fancying 
that he still suggests substantial moods, and commu- 
nicates something from the infinite. Thus superfluous 
sentiments encumber the nature, amuse and occupy 
the mind, and finally become subjective habits which 
are easily mistaken for objective facts, and are of the 
same flaccid fibre with the dreams and raptures of the 
mediaeval saint. Charity itself becomes an imitation 
of a person who is supposed to have revealed for the 
first time how divine it is. There is a soft and delight- 
ful playing at beneficence ; it breaks out in vestries 



64 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

hung with mottoes, where people assemble to enjoy 
tableaux of religious sociability. It rages at fairs 
started to buy an organ, carpet the aisles of the Church 
of the Nativity, stock the library of the Sunday School 
with razeed novels. And when the brotherhood of 
man is patronized, it is under the authority of some 
fraternal sayings of the great-hearted man who was 
despised by his generation. Every person who longs 
to be moored and at rest fastens his cable backward 
to those verbal buoys ; every person who sees some- 
thing to be accomplished runs his band around that 
distant feeding-wheel of one man's character. The 
waste of power is great ; it is mainly absorbed by 
holding up this enormous length of reminiscence. 
The mind imagines that it is engaged in spontaneous 
and freshly born virtue, when it is only recurring to 
the tradition of it. This imitation may raise money 
and produce various social and ecclesiastical effects, 
but it leaves personal inspiration crippled : the soul is 
no longer a pioneer but a dependent. The muscles 
of the individual are deprived of their formidable 
natural movements by learning this continuous back- 
ward gesture ; it is finely and gracefully acquired, but 
at the expense of some stunting to the whole manhood. 
Only the best conditioned people can do their work 
handsomely under this drawback. 

But they do a very ill service to the average mind 
of the country, or to those who from mixed motives 
personally adhere to them, when they infer that their 
successful struggle with a disadvantage is the natural 
superiority of their mediating scheme. Even if their 
morality never degenerated into mimicry, they would 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 65 

have no case. There is not one theology that is not 
true to the extent of its ethical ability. Fetichism 
could have made as large a boast, while preventing it 
from growing larger. Bad mental method sometimes 
makes an atheist of a man who can claim all neigh- 
borly and admirable qualities : they are the proof of 
the God whom he imagines he is denying. 

Plenty of manly people swear by the stiffest cate- 
chisms all life long, who put them into the cupboard 
if any sudden peril knocks at their door to startle the 
blood into heroism ; and perhaps their dead leaves 
may be rolled into cartridges for a living flame, as 
they take the field with men who never saw a cate- 
chism, or imagined that they held spiritual life in 
consequence of a man who died once. The heavy 
and the light believers use the common cartridge to 
some purpose before the affair is through. The only 
mediator in such business is the God-given pluck that 
forgets every thing but the defence of the new truth 
that is in danger close at hand. 

The most advanced mechanics of liberal religion, 
observing how men have been retarded by their cum- 
brous attachments to that distant centre where motive- 
power is supposed to reside, have invented thinner and 
lighter bands. Catholic paganism, Orthodox inconse- 
quence, are laid aside. All the rude mediaeval methods 
are discarded by these shifty liberals, who cry from 
their stand, " Here is a new patent, the latest product 
of American ingenuity, this flexible yet durable con- 
nection with a redeeming person ; it only weighs an 
ounce where the old fabrics weighed a ton, almost 
thin as gossamer yet tough as steel, this subtly spun 



66 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

web of intimacy with a great divine Brother, who 
was no kind of a God at all, far from it, nor any 
supernatural official ; who worked miracles, to be sure, 
because he could not help it any more than the birds 
can help singing, but who never emphasized them 
offensively, nor used them to sugar coat his truths ; 
the one divine man who so actually became what is 
only possible with us, that his actuality introduces our 
possibility to God : the way, the truth and the life : 
alive to-day, a personality as large as Christendom, 
and in close consultation with every point of the sur- 
face ; so that men have a medium that was born out 
of their own human nature, and something of iden- 
tical texture all the way from earth to heaven is now 
ready for delivery to parties. How many will your 
parish take? Hasten to connect your inner works 
with this source of movement by slipping on a rational 
mediator. Price? Ah — only a pew-tax apiece." .It 
may weigh an ounce where the other methods weighed 
a ton; but, unfortunately, ounces in the long run 
accumulate so frightfully that we begin to doubt the 
need of deriving our power in this way from a source 
beyond ourselves. We notice that our other functions 
do not have to travel so far to be fed. Even if this 
great Brother, who is alive to-day, be somewhere in 
this neighborhood, what accommodation can I offer 
him ? His Father has hired my premises, and would 
fain occupy all the rooms, from garret to cellar. 

We are kept alive upon this spot where we now 
stand, from this food at our feet and this ambient light 
and air. There is a power with us, occupying the 
actual interior of this body, commensurate with a 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 6j 

thousand million similar bodies : there is not the dis- 
tance of an inch between us and it. Sublimely eco- 
nomical, it makes the body its instantaneous link of 
communication. Cannot the power which sustains, 
without budging from the spot, my personal vitality, 
sustain and nourish the immediate conscience of which 
that vitality makes me aware? I cannot hurt my 
health, nor tell a lie, nor commit a fraud, nor strike my 
brother, nor leave the beggar in the ditch, nor parade 
my superiorities, without knowing it by direct intima- 
tion. My pains are its rebukes, my delights its sym- 
pathy, my hopes its suggestions, my sacrifices its 
impost, my heavenly longings its apology for haunting 
me forever. There is a Power in which I live and 
move and have my being, in which I eat, drink, breathe, 
sleep and wake, love and hate, marry and protect a 
home. Is it incapable of sustaining all my functions 
of direct religion on the spot, as well as these ? Do I 
have these without a mediator, and must I travel for 
the rest ? When I undertake to breathe by tradition it 
will be time for me to get a sense of God in the same 
way. For, look you, Jesus breathed where he stood. 
If I cannot breathe where I stand, I cannot do it by 
standing elsewhere. I am hardly conscious that I 
draw this morning's air, and sweeten myself clear 
through with it just where I stand on my two feet, 
till you insist that I make a great mistake in drawing 
this air, unmixed, as God brews it over Massachusetts. 
My lungs have expanded to a calibre that corresponds, 
and I can take it undiluted ; stand up and take it 
streaming to my nostrils and my lips. 

No plan for furnishing mediatorial power can sur- 



68 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

vive this test of private experience. The Nile is only 
a geographical fact to the miller who finds a stream 
upon his own grounds that is able to turn his wheel. 
He delights more in that than in reports concerning 
the freshet that makes the distant desert blossom. 
And a stream may still roll on between the shattered 
hints of its old civilization, without long moving the 
regrets of men who build by new streams the monu- 
ments of Nature's unchangeable resources. 

This private experience must be quite general, or it 
fails in something that is important to its authority. 
We would say, it must be universal, if ignorance and 
passion had not taught us that there are misfortunes of 
birth and bringing up ; these distort and obscure the 
original intention of conscience. A great many cases 
are then commended to the prevailing sense for justice 
and humanity. But if it prevails enough to secure a 
country where the individual, notwithstanding moral 
feebleness and a sluggish intuitive perception, is still 
considered sacred, it is universal enough to show that 
moral strength and intuition are born upon the spot, 
for immediate consumption, and not derived through 
the delay and wastage of importation from foreign 
lands. 

As soon as this general conscience is applied to the 
cases of hereditary obliquity, to the victims of oppres 
sion and neglect, and to the dangerous people, they 
also betray a relationship to the universal soul ; so that, 
at length, no sanitary method is safe or prosperous 
which does not begin by assuming that God is healthy 
just behind its subjects also, in spite of appearances, 
and that their health, if gained at all, must be gained 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 69 

through their direct communion with Him. We may 
appeal to them with traditional phrases, but our genu- 
ine appeal is in the instant's fraternity that startles a 
slumbering family feeling ; it is something in the 
method that labors with them that takes their sonship 
for granted ; it is the latest common sense that consults 
the latest knowledge in the interest of this sacredness, 
puts science in the place of sentiment, and sets a living 
Commonwealth to restore them to their spiritual rights. 
And no name less venerable than the name of God 
need be spoken during this vindication of God's pres- 
ence : nor that either so long as it is vindicated. 

In this way private experience discovers the organic 
laws that sustain the human reason, or minister to its 
restoration when it has become impaired. 

Organic laws do not deal in superfluities. They 
enlarge all things to their true nature by stripping 
them of the incumbrances of methods that were gen- 
erated by phrases. At first, when these mufflers are 
taken off, the size of manhood seems diminished. 
But it has laid aside the aspect that was only imposing 
to childish eyes, to assume compact, clean and virile 
proportions. Then men perceive that a well-trained 
strength either threatens or invites them, as they 
please. 

When ancient investigation consented to put up with 
phrases, the development of science was arrested, not 
to be resumed till natural forces were substituted for 
verbal ingenuity. Thus, when Pythagoras said that 
Number was the cause of all created things, he vaguely 
implied the modern discoveries of the numerical ratios 
that exist in astronomy, chemistry, harmony, indeed, 



7 o 



AMERICAN RELIGION. 



wherever material elements betray the existence of 
Force ; but instead of becoming acquainted with force 
or motion, he lingered speculating with the conception 
of Number, and then his discoveries were mainly 
accidents. So when Aristotle explained the weight 
and the falling of bodies by the notion that some things 
must be absolutely light, and some absolutely heavy, 
gravitation had to wait for a Newton to discard the 
empty phrases, and discover the natural energy which 
held him bound to one spot as he went spinning with a 
central force, in balanced harmony with all the worlds. 

So theology has been working at the notion that the 
individual conscience subsists in consequence of a Book, 
and rotates around that, or is first stimulated into action 
by it ; that its authority is a page of print ; that it is 
developed, or redeemed, by the life or the death of one 
person therein narrated. These phrases disappear as 
soon as the individual discovers that his soul defers to 
organic truth as his body defers to gravitation. Both 
are on the spot ; natural directions of forces which are 
displayed through him. How he sheds doctrinal su- 
perfluities, as he does the despotic interferences with 
politics, trade and family life, which assume his inca- 
pacity for self-government ! 

In this way, by long living upon the earth, Religion 
has learned to divest itself of every thing that is not 
essential to its life. By successions of battles and 
marches mankind has found out just what it ought to 
carry : the minimum of weight with the maximum of 
effectiveness. With less, there may be famine ; with 
more, weakness, confusion, fatal incumbrance at the 
moment of attack. Religion finds that it can subsist 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 71 

very well upon the spiritual reliances which are the 
result of the organic laws of the individual. It asks 
no more than the rest of the world : to know and 
understand its reason for being. Every branch of 
knowledge begins, simultaneously with the natural 
gesture of the soul, to turn interlopers out of doors, 
and write above, No admittance except on business. 

Then Religion must rely, first, upon the individual, 
who is the medium between knowledge and action, 
between the finite and the infinite. The past reaches 
the present in him : the present proceeds to a future, 
the invisible becomes incarnated in him. There is in 
fact nothing outside of the Individual. If any effect 
of past living fails to extend as far as his own being, it 
was really no effect at all. To be sure, he cannot be 
conscious of the whole modification which has resulted 
from the fact that other people lived previous to him ; 
but, so far as he is concerned, the past is the extent to 
which he has been modified. And there is practically 
as much God as he contains : he is an outline on the 
infinite. What is beyond does not exist vitally for him, 
but only as stellar spaces exist, which he may surmise 
to be peopled or unpeopled, to be within or outside of 
the solar system ; but he is not consciously implicated. 
He need not be aware of the extent to which he is 
modified by the Divine presence, but, in reality, all the 
rest of God is absent. The creative mind, in choosing 
to occupy the organizations it has conceived, has limited 
the knowledge of Himself to each and all. Also, the 
individual limits the existence of the world by his per- 
ceptions of it. There is nothing beyond the phenomena 
which he embraces and apprehends. It is true, he 



72 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

cannot detect many influences of nature which rush 
to him as to a point of attraction ; but while they 
temper him they cannot surpass his extent of enter- 
taining them. For him, there is no weather, nor land- 
scape, nor revolving year beyond his physical and 
mental range. He creates the world which he inhab- 
its. All the rest is no concern of his. 

There is a sense in which Religion appears to be co- 
extensive with the contents of the individual ; for he is 
sacred. No peculiar sanctity invests any one part or 
tendency. Nothing short of the whole of him can be 
a divine image, an expression of the amount of Life 
that is arrested by him. There is no schism in the 
members : he is all honorable from crown to feet, and 
whatever transpires beneath the roof which body and 
soul build for mutual convenience, whatever is secreted 
from the world by his minutest pore, becomes in him 
an acknowledgment of God. As soon as beauty of 
scenes and sounds are entangled in his network of 
nerves they fall to his hunger for beauty that is yet to 
be attained. The taste that trembles on his tongue in 
a moment of satisfaction, the fact that conspires with 
him to be accounted for, and the use he finds for every 
thing, become his reception of divine revelation, even 
if no phrases of adoration pass his lips. 

But if they are sung by the harmony of all created 
things, as they muster to his organs to find in them an 
orchestra to express their joy, they too are a part of his 
personal religion. This can only occur in fortunate 
moments, when confluent streams of life announce 
themselves, or natural gladness hurries up the stairs of 
rhythm to an interview with God, or when terror and 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 73 

beauty break awe-stricken into the soul. But these 
moments cannot be imitated, nor stereotyped for use in 
meeting-houses. There is a singing-bird that would 
pine in the cage of a liturgy, one that seldom alights 
on the limed twig of stated prayer. Yet the hunt is 
kept up the most vigorously in districts where the 
game is scarcest. Is it worth while? 

It is better to find that Religion perforins her state- 
liest worship when she feels herself liberated in the 
sacredness of the individual, and put to her uses. 

She must rely, then, upon what he contains. It fol- 
lows that there can be no test or basis of certitude out- 
side of himself, in matters of the moral and spiritual 
life. His attainment is the last court of appeal. It is 
so wherever he attains to positive facts and information 
in any department ; but in every other one excepting 
morals and his sense of God, he can rely upon external 
authority. He is obliged to take the antipodes for 
granted, and is willing to let Herschel tell him what 
the nebula contains. If he cannot lead Darwin and 
Agassiz, he follows gratefully, and gleans as much of 
the universe as his mind can hold. He descends a shaft 
with faith in the safety-lamp which some one puts into 
his hand, and he borrows a telescope to set in order 
those choirs of " young-eyed cherubim" who crowd 
the night. Wherever he cannot go in person, he risks 
going by proxy, even when his safety and health are 
involved ; and he has made so many experiments of 
this kind that he finds trust to be an economy. The 
bee hives honey more compactly than he can, and the 
surgeon ties an artery so that the life is stayed. 

But even of trust he is the sole criterion ; for it is the 

4 



74 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

result of his personal experience. If he trusts another 
person, it must be on some good ground discovered by 
himself. He may or may not consider mere relation- 
ship a sufficient ground, but whatever gains his con- 
sideration becomes his sole criterion. 

In moral and spiritual truth no relationship suffices, 
no traveller can report any news. He meets all 
the Marco Polos half way with a tale as sumptuous, 
as strange and true. The plain Yea and Nay are both 
hemispheres settled by him when he came into the 
world. He took possession in the name of the original 
proprietor, who sent him out to colonize and improve. 
And now shall anybody undertake to sell him his own 
food and spices, raised for home consumption on his 
own farm, and the fabrics which he spins against the 
weather ? 

He finds the wild crab of sincerity, and improves it 
to a staple fruit. It is the tree of knowledge standing 
in the middle of his garden. His eyes are opened. 
The true and the false, the pure and the impure, the 
straight and the crooked, the just and the unjust, the 
tender and the harsh, all clean and unclean things are 
named by him as they defile. 

He can beg or borrow other kinds of knowledge, but 
nothing short of the man himself can purchase a beati- 
tude. How plain this ought to be to the emaciated 
crowds who watch some pool's mouth to move for 
them. They cannot step into a text for healing. 
Health is theirs for the choosing, but if they choose a 
text, the virtue still remains outside. 

It is plain that somebody has been so certain of truth 
that a text transpired in consequence. But if another 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 75 

person thinks to pick up moral certitude with the text 
that lies before him, he will vainly peel its shadow 
from the ground. He cannot even be certain that 
another one was certain ; but only certain that he 
thought he was. For all texts are merely assumptions 
of past certainties, till the moment when they become 
superfluous ; and that is when the eternal certitude 
repeats itself in the individual. For it is the evolution 
of personal life, and not the attainment of a fact, thought 
or feeling. 

Every individual inherits a certain amount of moral 
culture, and if he comes into life by fortunate descent 
he may begin where centuries leave off. But he does 
not begin until the new circumstances force him into 
independence, whither he betakes himself with all his 
heir-looms. Previous to that, perhaps, he nurses 
himself in the family chair and reads over the 
ancient will. That is not virtue, but a branch of 
archaeology. 

Boys and girls come to Sunday Schools prepared to 
repeat chapters of holy writ, by which it is expected 
that manhood and womanhood will be inculcated. 
Can they ever be in that way ? There was a time when 
the Republic grew heroic without such mechanism. 
Names of superior dignity in all nations ought to sug- 
gest to us that virtue is extorted by the business of the 
week. A vague sentiment of respect towards the 
record of past greatness cannot convince a living soul 
that it is criterion and source of greatness yet to come. 
That secret lies in Monday, when fidelity is exacted, 
and the invisible record picks up the homeliest blocks 
to spell itself legibly all along the week, before the 



*j6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

impertinent catechism claims memory again, and puts 
the living Gospel by. 

Does anybody deny the existence of this invisible 
record ? Whence, then, came the written one ? Truly 
it seems as if we thought that earth achieved nothing 
till it had been written down. Millions of divine 
incarnations do not succeed in achieving so much as 
an epitaph. But the family brain-cells frame some fit 
acknowledgment. 

"Do thy good in love of goodness purely! 
That commit to every vein ; 
Through the children if it runneth poorly, 
For some grandchild 'twill remain." 

We suspect that we can be deluged with stories of 
brave men who remembered appropriate texts in criti- 
cal moments, out of Homer, from all poets to the Bible, 
and thence to the latest lyric which some deed inspired. 
Men are simple enough to declare sometimes that the 
words which fitted like a rhyme to their action were 
its parent and supporter. A more rational explanation 
shifts the paternity to the action. The words came 
thronging into the inspiration which had already 
approached and thrown wide open the doors of life. 
The dull text glowed as the thrilling moment found 
it in the way. Before one has time to remember " It 
is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God," 
the temptation must have lost its power. Else how 
abandoned to inexplicable wrath must the men and 
women have been who had to find their way into brave 
living before Moses was set adrift in the papyrus, or 
any man had borrowed the reed to record one natural 
commandment. 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 77 

" Let us consider," says Mr. Newman, the English 
Catholic, " how differently young and old are affected 
by the words of some classic author, such as Homer 
or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but rhetori- 
cal commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a 
hundred others which any clever writer might supply, 
which he gets by heart and thinks very fine, and imi- 
tates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing 
versification, at length come home to him, when long 
years have passed, and he has had experience of life, 
and pierce him, as if he had never before known them, 
with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then 
he comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth 
of some chance morning or evening at an Ionian festi- 
val, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted generation 
after generation, for thousands of years, with a power 
over the mind, and a charm, which the current litera- 
ture of his own day, with all its obvious advantages, is 
utterly unable to rival. Perhaps this is the reason of 
the mediaeval opinion about Virgil, as if a prophet or 
magician ; his single words and phrases, his pathetic 
half lines, giving utterance, as the voice of Nature her- 
self, to that pain and weariness, yet hope of better 
things, which is the experience of her children in every 
time." * 

This is an excellent statement of the reflex action of 
personal experience upon sacred books. In the revela- 
tion of life men gather maturity of thought and depth 
of emotion. Riveted to the spot of their destiny they 
stand, while the day turns for them the pages of a 

* Grammar of Assent : page 76, Am. Ed. 



78 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

book, and lets the light fall upon the texts of joy, 
terror and pity ; the sudden claim of brotherhood, the 
warning of a vitiated temper, the exigencies of love 
and duty, flash out of moments of living, like electric 
sparks, into the soul, and find their equilibrium in per- 
sonal conviction. Then new sentences might replace 
the old ones that sprung from the sincerity of similar 
moments. But if the old ones are met by the soul, as 
it travels with a fresh morning behind it, the light that 
falls upon their faces thrills and surprises, and it runs 
forward to greet them. Certainly, they must be mem- 
bers of its family, whose absence it had not noted ; 
kindred, at least, who left the old homestead before 
they grew familiar. 

When Scriptures glow, it is with the same life that 
gave them birth : they are indebted to us, not we to 
them. Virgil is not alone in profiting by the suc- 
cess of these magical moments ; they promote all 
their kindred apostles to the assumption of possessing 
extraordinary qualities. 

But Scriptures share this advantage with every 
object of nature and art that receives the tardy investi- 
ture of our own beauty or grandeur. When we have 
an eye for a landscape, there is one : previously, we 
notice without emotion an assemblage of stones and 
trees. If Orpheus sits in the midst, they come to 
listen with attitudes and relations grouped around the 
vibrations of his lyre. 

Our sum of vitality creates the quality of terror as 
well as of delight. The child walks unconsciously 
as a somnambulist around the parapet, while the 
mother clings to every movement, pale and speechless 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY, 79 

as Athens expecting the cry of Agamemnon's murder. 
Our perception of the most trivial thing is just as deep 
as we are. 

Nature holds an open book, and invites us all to try 
her sortes, and many a comforting coincidence is found. 
But when the spider swings for the third time, and 
fastens the thread of his little homily to the wall, the 
bolder heart of a Bruce must be at hand to turn it into 
songful deeds. 

It is pertinent to ask if this private consciousness of 
a criterion of truth has been waiting till America 
furnished its social and political opportunity. The 
theologian objects that an organic law of the indi- 
vidual ought always jto have been as peremptory as 
seeing and hearing, both of which men have done for 
themselves from the beginning. Hardly : we still see 
with others' eyes, and it is an American failing to 
hear by one vast organ, called popular opinion, whose 
tympanum is vigorously beaten by fetich-masters of 
all creeds. But the objector forgets how much more 
rapidly bodies have developed than souls ; and Nature 
has served the inner senses latest of all her guests. 
Their scramble for food began at the mouth. Not till 
that is fully occupied do higher cravings vex mankind 
in moments of leisure from hunger. 

Men will not seek and appropriate truths till they 
are felt to be worth the while ; especially if they have 
not yet been brought within the daily necessities. 
They may belong to the soul by inherent right and 
constitution, still they will remain only a latent tend- 
ency, and seem as strange as foreign products, till a 
demand for them springs up. While men can get 



80 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

along pretty well without, no trouble will be taken 
to seek and to procure them. But as soon as by 
chance, or by the reiterated assurances of some soul 
who makes the planet and the year adventurous, or by 
the pressure exercised by accumulating knowledge and 
perceptions of life, men begin to feel that they can 
be enriched, greatly improved in comfort, simplified 
in living, by these far things, they are discovered to be 
near and accessible. The distance was nothing but 
disuse. 

In the beginning of this century, Humboldt carried 
to Europe the first specimens of Peruvian guano, with 
accounts of the profits derived from its use by the 
natives of Peru and China. But the industrial world 
waited thirty years, supinely indifferent ; till at length 
a few essays of the new fertilizer were made, followed 
by another interim of neglect which lasted ten years. 
Then suddenly 433 vessels carried it to every quarter 
of the globe. In the next year twenty-six million 
dollars worth of it was transported, and three hundred 
million dollars worth of it during the first twenty 
years of the traffic. 

The so called " Mammoth-Coasts " of Siberia retain, 
with a grasp of iron, deposits of ivory which were 
known to Pliny and Theophrastus, but which came 
into use only about two hundred years ago, and have 
furnished, since that beginning, scarcely 40,000 pounds 
of ivory a year : not enough to help the children of 
a single country cut their teeth. Yet a fresh island, 
or an unexplored stretch of coast, yields new quarries 
of the durable material, and becomes an enamelled in- 
vitation to mankind to come and help itself, for it is 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 8 1 

inexhaustible. It is said that a solitary ivory hunter 
can procure 20,000 pounds of it in a year. 

Truths do not create new wants, but provide more 
portable and exact methods of meeting the old ones. 

Such a truth, for homeliness, practicality, daily con- 
venience for use and beauty, is the absolute independ- 
ence and authority of the conscience. One would 
think it must have been self-evident from the begin- 
ning, if it were really embedded in the primitive 
substance of the soul. But generations must develop it 
into working consciousness. It is not enough that a 
few explorers make it known. Their recommenda- 
tion is not heeded, while the majority get along pretty 
well upon the authority of books, texts and codes of 
manners, results of successive stages of this very inde- 
pendence of moral and spiritual insight. The grand 
gesture is not yet freed into the daily life. As soon as 
men begin to use their new advantages, they wonder 
how life was carried on without them, and cannot be 
induced to recur to the old methods, because it is now 
plain how much slaving and wasting they involved. 
Coal, steam, the magnetic circuit, all primitive pos- 
sibilities, are in the world and in the soul, lying all 
ready to be used, disturbing men for centuries with 
unquiet dreams in which they hear the vague, tumult- 
uous cry, " Come, use me." By and by the souls 
wake up, and say gladly, " Come, be used." 

Propositions that are styled self-evident, like the 
u blazing ubiquities" of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, are not so till they become evident to ourselves. 
But then they exist nowhere else. Previous to that, 
we may accede to them as abstractions, but they are 

4* 



82 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

not evident till they become essential to our life and 
happiness. The beatitudes are as distant as the 
guano islands, as superfluous as the whiteness of a 
buried tusk, till the day's comfort calls for them. 
Then we justify them, and become in person the only 
authorization they can ever acquire. Before that, 
miracles could not annex them to our life, or be their 
guarantee. 

Bodies of the ancient Egyptians, that were dipped 
in natron till they became mummified, are thrust by 
modern stokers underneath the boilers that ply along 
the Nile. The brains are out of these dead texts with 
which the Copt gets up his steam. Our Scripture 
compends and catechisms might also be of some use 
upon the rail, if they made up in bitumen for their 
lack of vitality. 

This original position of the individual cannot ex- 
empt him from the advantages of being cultivated any 
more than it can detach him from the past. His 
soul had ancestors who were not of his family connec- 
tion, and by enlarging his acquaintance with them he 
restores them to the family line. But the characters 
in Plutarch and in the Bible do not surrender to him 
their trophies : at the most, they can only count upon 
depriving him of sleep. 

" Care not to strip the dead 
Of his sad ornament, — 
His myrrh, and wine, and rings, 
His sheet of lead, 
And trophies buried : 

Go, get them where he earned them when alive ; 
As resolutely dig or dive." 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 83 

This is the lesson of every Bible. If any other is 
forced upon it, the individual has to be defrauded for 
this spurious aggrandizement of a book. It stands in 
the line of every man's culture to surrender to him all 
private claims of excellence as fast as he detects them : 
they are jewels that belong to his modern housekeep- 
ing, and the servant cannot be above his lord to retain 
them. 

If the sacred books do not urge a man to instant 
flight on pain of being enslaved, they do not serve 
him. " Fly ! " cries the beauty at the postern, " I hear 
the steps at hand — I would not have even thee my 
captive. In some distant land rescue thyself and find 
me." He tears himself away from this celebrated 
reality, and flies from the door that opens into the 
unknown night, pursued by the garden perfumes that 
cling and flatter, almost too persuasive against the 
thrilling touch of obstacles and the stir of a coming 
dawn, by whose light he finds his way into the arms 
of his Ideal, and clasps life instead of narrative. He 
generously acknowledges whatever means for prose- 
cuting this journey he has borrowed from the past, be 
it but a gourd of water and a crust in his pocket. 
But no gratitude can make him stay ; no refreshment 
win him to dependence ; no lingering, delightful mem- 
ories unfasten his exploring gear, and soothe him in 
the old lap beneath the palms. As he shoulders man- 
fully through the dense undergrowth of new condi- 
tions, he takes up the old refrain of sacred independ- 
ence, the only bit of the great song that stays by him : 
" Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of 
olden time — but /say unto thee." // who is this I? 



84 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Not upstart John or James, but every man's Person, 
old as God, and therefore young forever. 

This I is the sacred individual who makes implied 
truths explicit, and finds the virtues and politics of 
the New Testament waiting for him on the spot. But 
whether he becomes a great man, or is formidable only 
within the concrete of insignificance, God cannot serve 
him except with the old Spirit that served all sacred 
men. So close is He, that there is nothing new. 
Shall we hear conservatives and antiquarians prate of 
the reverence due to age ? 

America shall yet learn to pay to great men the 
purest reverence that the world has seen, by denying 
their official mediatorship and restoring them to the 
privileges of the human Ideal. Every pedestal will 
become vacant, and a pavement of equal hearts will 
vibrate with the steps of poetry, art, and conscience. 

The great spiritual men of all times and races 
differ as the water-sheds of earth do, in outline and 
flora. Between the meadow's smile and the austere 
summit, various contrasted meridians lie stretched along 
the ample slopes and emerge from the many-fashioned 
chasms. But the sky around and above holds in 
solution one unchangeable vapor which they condense 
and transmit. And people must learn to use the 
w r ater of their locality for their daily needs, just where 
they live. The day passes while they run with pails 
to various springs of hearsay. Abana and Pharpar 
are as good as the Jordan to those who are not upon 
the Jordan's banks, and quite as cleansing. It would 
be very simple to waste time in venerating tourists, 
and the specimens of sacred waters which they bring 



THE AMERICAN OPPORTUNITY. 83 

home. Even the charm of distance adheres to the 
brook that skirts your field, for loudly as any traveller 
it prattles of the far zone where the sun's ray drew 
it into the wind's circuit to have it deposited upon 
Wachusett or Meeting-House Hill. 



IV. 

THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 

THE word Immanence, equivalent to In-being, is 
more convenient than Inspiration to express the 
cooperation of a divine force with all the structures of 
the universe, and with the conscience of the individual. 
It is more exact, because it implies an unbroken con- 
tinuity of Presence. First, we claim its universality in 
man, as preliminary to a discussion of its law. 

The Eastern Convent of Sittna receives, at a certain 
season of the year, a stream of pilgrims, drawn from 
all quarters by the attraction of a mysterious chamber. 
It is a room, one wall of which is the outer wall of the 
convent, with a high domed ceiling, and destitute of 
windows. A single narrow slit admits a beam of light 
which slants upon the ceiling, and faintly flickers there 
with the movements of the people and things which 
happen to be outside. The special religious observ- 
ance for which this convent is famous consists in pack- 
ing this room with successive relays of the pilgrims, 
who do nothing but watch the ceiling. The darkness 
is almost total, the heat prodigious, the fragrance hardly 
worth speaking of. The unwashed devotees crowd 
and hustle each other, and give vent to excited cries as 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 87 

often as a shadow flits across the ceiling. That is the 
miracle for which they are waiting. The angle that is 
made by the slit is concealed by priestly ingenuity, and 
the ignorant gazers have been taught for centuries to 
suppose that the sudden and elusive movements on the 
ceiling are supernatural gestures of a divine power. 
All that they can learn about the invisible comes shift- 
ing through that slit : a small allowance, but perhaps 
as much as any minds can receive which have not been 
nurtured in the light. Wherever the theory of religion 
is that God likes to creep into a dark room through a 
crevice, the mental calibre will correspond. Substitute 
for this the true theory that God is the light, the weather, 
the sun and rain, the men and women, and all the ani- 
mated open country, you need not expect to recruit 
believers out of the dark chamber. When a man takes 
a great deal of trouble and travels many miles in order 
to suffocate in a close and fetid space, you must wait 
till the effect becomes insupportable to human nature, 
which by that time may be willing to use the eyes, the 
ears and the lungs that God has given to it. 

I presume that the most popular crevice, towards 
which the greatest number of sincere human beings is 
struggling to get a glimpse of God, is the doctrine that 
He has moments of special inspiration, and has always 
preferred to manifest himself at intervals, to speak 
with isolated authority through a church, a tradition, a 
book, an occasional prophet, an exceptional circum- 
stance, a particular providence. What a mob of every 
generation rushes out of the universe, where there is 
free play for every limb and sense, and jams itself into 
this close and covered passage, till the pressure becomes 



S8 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

so great that the whole mass of living beings stands 
packed, and hardly one has a chance to break loose 
and discover that the passage leads nowhere, in fact, 
stops abruptly at a dead wall. The ingenuity that is 
wasted, by guides and teachers, to make this doctrine 
plausible, and to repair the damages done from time to 
time by pure investigation, reminds me of the strata- 
gems of the Africans when they meditate a grand bat- 
tue of wild animals. Two lines are made, a mile or 
more in length, frank and open enough at one end, but 
gradually converging into a palisaded paddock with a 
pit ; these lines are fortified with interlacing branches, 
fallen trees and brushwood, so that it would be difficult 
to find or force a gap. When the whole arrangement 
is as involved and bristling as a theological argument, 
the driving begins. The natives, scattered over the 
country, beat every grove and thicket, and slowly force 
the roused animals towards the tunnel. There is a 
howling native watching at every weak point of the 
line, as the mingled horde comes trampling and rush- 
ing in. Cunning and strength will not avail, natu- 
ral reluctance at being impounded yields to pressure. 
The silly giraffe, the shy antelope, the doubling stag, 
the sagacious elephant, all go over together into a pro- 
miscuous heap of misplaced confidence. By the time 
the elephant has discovered that he would have con- 
sulted his welfare better by remaining in the open 
country, it is too late to return there. So do many 
excellent intelligences impress us as being victims of 
well prepared doctrinal devices, and to be much larger 
by nature than the place into which they have been 
driven or insensibly beguiled. 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 89 

Consider how it must narrow and hamper a mind to 
grow up with, or to have forced upon it, the notion 
that the Infinite Soul is listening, or waiting, or deliver- 
ing himself, at a few crevices, before which humanity 
must assemble. The common education of the people, 
in all classes, lecture-rooms and pulpits, ought to throw 
wide open the idea that God is equivalent to the whole 
of Life, the whole of History, the whole of Science 
and Religion ; that he is an immeasurable Presence, 
holding the roots of every sweet or noxious thing, with iy 
a growth that has an immense range from the violet to \f 

the Mariposa cedar, and an immediate purpose in the 
nettle, the white-weed, the hay and corn, the orchard 
and the vine ; that men too, like his other growths, 
exist from his immediate intentions, and that every 
temper sounds a note in the swelling harmony, while 
every soul is visited by the daily tides of his Moral 
Law. Mankind is like a coast, say the Atlantic, whose 
beaches and indentations and shallow creeks, and Bays 
of Fundy with deep and sudden influxes of ocean, 
measure altogether many thousands of miles, every 
inch of which is visited by the same element that rolls 
and whitens at the foot of cliffs, and overruns the sand 
bars ; and there is not the smallest pebble which does 
not chime w T ith the hugest boulder in delivering that 
sound, when waters reach them, which the sailors call 
the rote of the shore. It makes an unbroken murmur, 
in various keys, from the Grand Menan to the coral reefs 
of Florida. And the history of mankind is like it, a / 
continuous sounding of the ripples of the divine pres- * 
ence, all of it sacred, none of it profane. When the 
tide is out, there is still depth enough for the whaler 



I 



90 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

to pursue his prey, and for the whale to gather his ; in 
the meantime, the sand-piper goes balancing after the 
worms in the low banks, the heron stands knee-deep 
in the warm shallows, waiting for his fish, and the 
eagle does not float so high that he cannot see the 
turning of a fin in the sunlight. Boys and men on 
the rocks throw baits to the great element, and gather 
perhaps more by the eye and the soul than their slen- 
der hooks could ever land. Thus all is feeding and all 
is fed : all is serviceable, and all performs its service. 
And the heart of God beats in the slender pulsation of 
the jelly-fish, and in the child's imagination who turns 
it over with a stick and wonders why it was made. 
Thus it has been from the beginning : Life itself an 
unbroken book of Revelation, whose age may be 
counted by millions of years, and cannot be forced into 
the legs and arms of our short, threadbare chronology ; 
a Life of unceasing giving and receiving, wonder and 
satisfaction, partial discomforts and complete delights, 
secrets that remain inscrutable long enough to compel 
solution, problems of human destiny and of the divine 
will that are continually betraying the intellect into the 
discovery that nothing is special, nothing exceptional, 
nothing common or unclean. God himself, year in 
and year out, is so religious in that infinite and com- 
plex appearance called the universe, so incessantly in 
earnest, never absent, never nodding, always throb- 
bing with a purpose, so consistent too, and uniform in 
every action that he undertakes, always using the same 
elements over and over again in nature, and always 
appealing to man through the moral senses that are the 
same yesterday, to-day and forever, that it is impossi- 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 91 

ble for us to put our finger on a moment of the whole 
and say, Here was God manifest, and on another and 
say, Here he was not so manifest, since it is all mani- 
festation, a vesture woven without seam from top to 
bottom, stretching from trilobite to prophet, farther 
than that even, from the first movement that made a 
separation into worlds and sky, to the last impulse 
that some heavenly soul had to select a divine pur- 
pose, and live or die by it. 

It is true that for convenience of reference we divide 
the doings of a creative mind into different provinces 
and studies. We try to observe what its method is in 
making the soil, the diamond, the metal, the gas ; what 
relation exists between the elements and forces of na- 
ture ; how history has been modified by the character- 
istics of different tribes of people, and by what law 
human intelligence has become developed. We see 
that the mind itself is capable of very dissimilar opera- 
tions : one man invents a steam-plough, or a cotton-gin, 
another composes a poem or a symphony. One writes 
a lyric like the Marseillaise, that runs into the blood of 
nations, like drum-beats, to climb in the flush of patri- 
otism to the cheek ; another soul breathes the Psalm 
of filial confidence, and wakes our own if it sleeps, a 
mother's hand to us in the morning. And another 
pours out God's own indignation at superstitions, idol- ^ 
atries, wickedness in high places ; he prophesies that a 
better time is coming, and bids men clear the way. 
Many men have had nothing but their blood to give, — 
no song, no chapter, no invention. Nero caught some 
Christians, and, after swathing them in tarred cotton, 
set them on fire to light his garden during a feast. 



o: AMERICAN EtSl IGION. 

The illumination wont farther than his garden. God 

never yet kindled a fagot, and made a costly lamp of 
a man, to prolong epochs of darkness. 1 1 is purpose 
is light, and that interprets all his acts. Hut when 
Kepler travailed in the silent midnight to bring the law 

of the planetary distances into the world, he was as 
;r to Ciod as John lluss or John Brown. The 

agonies of faithful souls are clod's successes : all in- 
ventors who starved before their names became sweet 
morsels in men's mouths, all unknown singers of dear 
songs, all women who have played at Providence, all 
deaths that have been births, all crosses that have lifted 
up advantages and excellences, have been saered, none 
Special and exceptional, none of them profane. God's 
Eternal Tower and Godhead are clearly understood 
bv all the things that ever have been made. 

And we are discovering every day that the things 
which are made or done, notwithstanding the diversity 

iat ranges through all natural appearances and human 
action, have a closer relationship than we suspected. Is 
light one definite thing, is heat another thing distinct 
from light, is eleetrieity another, and magnetism still one 
more; We have already got far on the road to show- 
ing that all these are onlv modes or manifestations of 
motion. How mueh more will be included? Will 
the obscure processes that now figure under the phrases 
tc nervous fluid/ 1 "vital force/ 1 li cerebral action," be 
included in this simplification? We cannot tell; but 
the whole tendency is to trace all manifestations of 
force towards some centra] agency, and to accumulate 
the proofs of the divine unity. 

So there does not appear, at first, to be any relation- 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 93 

ship between the mental process that utilizes filth of 
cities or the waste of factories, to turn refuse into 
wheat-fields, to get more heat out of coke, and color 
Dut of coal-tar, and work out of the surplus steam, and 
that which economizes a kingdom's expenditure of 
time and money, teaches deaf-mutes to communicate 
ideas, reforms a criminal and adds him to society, pro- 
vides checks for infanticide, opens asylums to stop the 
moral rot in outcast women, and gathers up, in short, 
every fragment of virtue and labor that used to be car- 
ried off and wasted through the common sewer. The 
moral sense is at the bottom of all these processes : a 
reluctance to see either steam or human beings used 
extravagantly ; an instinct for saving, applied to differ- 
ent jDroducts. And this economy pays back to a coun- 
try's vital unity what it drew in the shape of conscience 
to carry on its operations. 

There is, of course, a vast difference between a spin- 
ning-jenny and an overworked and underfed seam- 
stress : the one is improved to save mechanical power, 
the condition of the other is ameliorated to preserve 
an immortal element. So a greater number of human 
feelings become implicated in the efforts to save it : 
personal sympathy is excited, indignation at the tyr- 
anny of low employers, and reverence for woman- 
hood. But, after all, the root of both economies is in 
the simple moral calculation, and the reluctance of the 
conscience to see any thing run to waste. This moral 
feeling may be very low in a number of people who, 
by temperament, abound in sympathetic impulses : 
their eyes will run to pity, but their hands will not 
bestir themselves. So that a less impressible person, 



94 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

with a clearer sense of justice and proportion, will be 
coldly working at the generous tasks which they neg- 
lect. A moral fitness, therefore, is the ground of rela- 
tionship between all improvements of the physical and 
spiritual nature, and the reason, too, why so many 
moral dangers are averted by providing, first, clothes 
for the back, to keep out the weather, and bread for 
the mouth, to create a genial zone within. All things 
depend so strictly on each other, because they come 
together in the unity of God. 

How is it when we enter other provinces of human 
thought and feeling in the company of poets, thinkers, 
and artists ? Here at first it seems as if we could rec- 
ognize some essential traits of divine inspiration, that 
set these men apart as special messengers to the race, 
isolated by their gift from common humanity, and or- 
ganized to be peculiar mouth-pieces of God. The 
Scotch peasant who drives his plough through a tuft 
of daisy, or dislodges the mouse from his meadow- 
hest, sees what Burns saw, but the seeing cannot be- 
come song. He can only go on ploughing, we say. 
But he can do more than that : he can love the song ; 
his heart welcomed it as soon as it was sung, and 
treasured it. It became a thing of joy forever. As 
often as he ploughs up daisies, or disturbs the §eld- 
mice, or wakes to new labor at morning, underneath 
the " lingering star with lessening ray " that trembles 
with the thoughts of Mary in Heaven, he vindicates 
his companionship with the poet, and exercises an 
essential element of genius. Conception itself has its 
root iri appreciation, and springs from the audience 
which it addresses ; the common earth contributes the 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 95 

qualities that are transmuted into the graceful lily and 
the stately tree. And human nature asserts the unity 
of all divine immanence, when it pays the tribute of 
the feelings which the poet claims. For the soul is 
not merely a string that vibrates to the touch of the 
musician, and would be mute until he came. But he 
is latent in all souls, otherwise there would be no ears 
to receive his revelation. 

What is fame but a famous element recognizing itself: 
the ordinary man pays homage to himself full-grown. 
Nothing in this world would be produced, if there 
were nothing that could receive. We have the habit 
to call the creative element an active one, and the re- 
ceptive element a passive one ; but both, in fact, are 
reproductive. Love sings the song which love appre- 
ciates and absorbs. One is not positive and one nega- 
tive, but the concurrence of both gives birth to every 
excellent and noble thing ; and I think that the gift of 
appreciation is as divine as the distinction of being 
appreciated. When God's unity passes through the 
atmosphere of Time and Space, it becomes separated 
into these two attributes which are continually yearn- 
ing for a perfect marriage, to return to the felicity of 
their original condition. The audiences at the Globe 
and Blackfriars' Theatres, of London, in the reign of 
Elizabeth, were bone and muscle of Shakspeare. They 
twain became one flesh in the laughters that recognized 
the human kind in FalstafF, and the tears that dropped 
those precious ballots to elect the fidelity of Cordelia 
and the woe of Constance. Shakspeare was alive as 
long as he fed upon the English nature ; the same in 
Athens, London, and Boston, yesterday and forever, the 



96 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

perpetual emphasis and reiteration of a divine motive 
in the hearts of men and women. God has only half 
a rapture when his gifted children apprehend and set 
forth the subtle analogies of wit and imagination ; they 
are barren till all his other children, who are gifted 
to plight troth to them, love, honor, and obey. Then 
the manifestation of genius is complete, and He knows 
the ecstasy of Creativeness. The result declares plain- 
ly that the Infinite could not have remained alone, in 
some aboriginal condition of unemanated Spirit. He 
was solitary, he longed to set himself in families. And 
we; by virtue of the same intention, are members of 
the family of Shakspeare, Beethoven, Raphael, Dante, 
Burns, to whom we give as much as we receive. 

" Always when an art predominates," says Henri 
Taine, " the contemporary mind contains its essential 
elements ; whether, as in the arts of poetry and music, 
these consist of ideas or of sentiments ; or, as in sculp- 
ture and painting, they consist of colors or of forms. 
Everywhere art and intelligence encounter each other, 
and this is why the first expresses the second, and the 
second produces the first." 

What an admirably pregnant little sentence is the 
old Latin " Laus est publica," that is, glory is public 
property : a famous man can only take stock with his 
admirers, and the interest is paid to all. 

Let this uniformity of creative elements be illustrated 
from another quarter. 

How Venus and Jupiter sparkle in the cloudless sky, 
so remote, lifted out of the reach of every thing but 
fancy, and set apart to be beautiful, in a kind of maid- 
enly reserve that penetrates and surprises. They are 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 97 

other worlds, but are they not also different ones? 
We can hardly believe that they have any thing in 
common with this clod of an earth, whose March mud 
and July dust and January snow-drifts seem scarcely 
capable of transmitting into space a ray serene. Yet 
we have discovered, by the application of analysis to 
the stellar spectrum, that every sparkle in the nightly 
sky announces the existence of a ball of dirt, consti- 
tuted, in all essential elements, like our own ; that the 
solar atmosphere itself yields the traces of metals that 
are only lying cold and unfused at home here, and 
that the most distant star in the constellation of Orion 
sends down to us the report that it is made like all 
the rest, whose splendors and whose tints are various, 
while all their grounds are the same. The physical 
elements exist in different combinations, as they flame 
upon all these hearthstones of God ; but the Sun has 
no fuel that the earth cannot supply, and Sirius and 
Jupiter cannot impose upon us with their airs of supe- 
riority. There are nickel, iron, and sulphur in the 
dazzle of the meteor : it charms and then drops to the 
bosom of an earth that is like itself. For the cause 
of sameness throughout all diversities is the Unity of 
God. 

Thus it has been found that the sun's atmosphere 
holds the vapors of copper, iron, zinc, nickel, sodium, 
and some others, and certain dark lines are ascribed 
to hydrogen. The fixed star Sirius, another sun, has 
an atmosphere which betrays the presence of iron, 
sodium, magnesium and hydrogen. Another fixed 
star adds calcium and bismuth ; another supplements 
these metals with tellurium, antimony and mercury. 

5 



98 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

So that there appears to be a variety in the physical 
constitution of fixed stars and planets, but all of their 
elements are already known to the Earth, and exist 
only in different combinations at these different places 
of the universe. The spectral analysis has not yet 
penetrated far enough into the secrets of space to 
reveal an element that is not already in the body of 
the earth itself. Should it ever do so, it will be a hint 
to subject our planet to a closer scrutiny. The vary- 
ing colors of the stars are either due to these particu- 
lar combinations, or to the varieties of stellar motions ; 
but color is the planet's masquerade. Analysis bids 
them lift their hues, and numerous earths are discov- 
ered waltzing in the cosmic order. 

And when we enter the region of ideas that are 
reigned over by the Moral Law, we find the same 
identity prevailing through all people, all periods of 
history, all sacred books, and the whole body of spir- 
itual literature. All Scripture is given by inspiration 
of God, and is profitable, say some. Others prefer 
to read the text thus : all Scripture that is given by 
inspiration of God is profitable. But what is the 
difference? There can be no profitable Scripture 
without God : and all that is profitable, wherever you 
may find it, under whatever strangeness of language, 
guise and phrase, must have been inspired, if any such 
trains of spiritual thinking are. When Socrates says, 
" I pray thee, O God, that I may be beautiful within," 
and David says, " Create in me a clean heart, and 
renew a right spirit within me," and Jesus says, 
" Blessed are the pure in heart," what is the differ- 
ence? The essential element is the same in all. 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 99 

When the old Hindoo declares, a thousand years be- 
fore Christ, that he who gives alms goes and stands 
on the highest place in heaven, and that the kind 
mortal is greater than the great in heaven, we recog- 
nize the quarry out of which came Christian philan- 
thropy. God is that quarry : how old it is ; how long 
it has supplied the world with spotless marbles ! " Do 
good, hoping for nothing in return, and ye shall be 
the children of the highest." God found no difficulty 
in transmitting the golden rule by monosyllables of the 
Chinese sages : it was done through the same channel 
of the moral sense that received it. 

There was a Syrian slave whose life in Rome began 
with the Christian era ; and while Jesus was preach- 
ing love to man in the villages of Judea, the heart of 
Publius Syrus was found large enough to contain the 
same doctrine of the Father. " Ab alio exfiectes" 
said he, " alteri quodfeceris" — You may expect the 
treatment which you render. x\ll the speeches of 
mankind have breathed this expectation. One lan- 
guage enjoins us to do unto others as we would that 
they should do to us ; another warns us not to inflict 
what we are not willing to experience, and another 
teaches that men will give as good as they receive ; 
and Tsze Kung said, " What I do not wish men to do 
to me, I also wish not to do to them." What is the 
difference ? Mutuality is the self-interest that inspires 
them all ; a Father's longing to appear through the 
cooperation of his children. 

While Publius Syrus was earning the title of Mimic 
Poet, from the production of his famous Mimes that 
exposed the foibles and passions of the Roman world, 



IOO AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Jesus was treading with a kindred spirit a via dolo- 
rosa. Publius was no mimic of truth, but obeyed an 
exigency as lofty as the Judean when he filled his 
plays with texts of holiness. His characters were 
" fools upon heavenly compulsion." " Do you not 
see," says Seneca, " how the benches echo w T henever 
things are said which we recognize to be true, as we 
lend them the authority of our common consent?" 
And he adds, recalling portions of the Scripture ac- 
cording to Publius, " We hear these things, cum ictu 
quodam, as by a flash ; doubt is made impossible, nor 
can any man ask, Wherefore? For such truth is its 
own reason." There can be no doubt of that. 
" The ivJiy is plain as way to parish church." 

So when Seneca sat not far from Caligula, and lis- 
tened to the terrible rebuke, Exeritur op ere nequitia, 
non incipit, he was overhearing the Judean phrase, 
" By their fruits ye shall know them; 99 for God can 
speak all languages in the same day. And as the bold 
speech swept over the theatre, drowning it in awe, to 
break against imperial wickedness, perhaps the sage 
remembered the kindred spirit of the Delphian oracle, 
which said to Glaucus, " To have meditated such a 
crime was your real crime against the god." There 
is no more difference in spiritual truth than in the 
waters which intercommunicate below the surface of 
the earth, and rise in fountains far apart to many- 
lipped mankind. 

Here are some of the intuitions of Publius Syrus, 
closely matched with their Christian analogues : — 

Amor misceri cum timore non potest : Perfect love 
casteth out fear. 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. IOI 

Pu7'as Deus non filenas asficit mci7tus : A man's 
life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he 
possesseth. 

Shiid est beneficium dare? Imitari Deum: Who 
maketh his sun to rise, &c. 

Benejicia filura accefiit, qui scit reddere: It is 
more blessed to give than to receive. 

"When you hear such lines," says Seneca, " you 
need no advocate to plead for them ; they touch the 
corresponding affections, and bid nature exercise her 
own authority." Of course : " Why even of your- 
selves judge ye not what is right?" 

All ancient literature is made so sacred by these 
primeval texts of the natural conscience that our page 
is too small to entertain them as they flock to the gates 
of memory.* 

When Jesus declared that his truth was permanent 
because it was identical with the nature of God, in 
such texts as "I and my Father are one," and 
" Before Abraham was I am," he did not say a more 
religious thing than Frederic Douglas, when, in the 
depth of the hatred and enmity that almost over- 
whelmed the little minority of abolitionists, he said, 
" One, with God, is a majority." They took up 
stones to cast at him, but he passed through the midst 
of them, and is as safe as his truth to-day. 

All fine living is derived from this consistency of 
the moral sense, which can afford to neglect ethnic 
peculiarities. We are sometimes told that though 

* See an admirable paper on " The Sympathy of Reli- 
gions," by T. W. Higginson, in the " Radical" for February, 
1871. 



102 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

identity of spiritual utterance can be traced across 
every zone, stumbled upon in unexpected quarters, 
and cradled out of many a moraine that marks past 
time, it became expressive of a perfect life only in one 
man. We might allege in reply, that one swallow 
does not make a summer ; for mankind must have 
ripened by some noon of high living that transpired 
in every year. Heroic texts are constructive evidence 
of heroic behavior. Nothing shows the absence of 
spiritual perception in a theologian so plainly as his 
surmise that all the sages have only thrown light 
upon the darkness of all the people, and that God 
had nothing for the latter but fine words. On such 
terms mankind would be still contemporary with the 
mastodon. Traces of high thinking presume superior 
living. The papyrus upon the breast of the mummy 
testifies that immortality was brought to light before 
the gospel ; but it never tells the breast's secret of its 
spotless life. The bandaged body that has turned to 
a stick of bitumen thrilled with plain manhood and 
womanhood, pined with the exigency of the golden 
rule, bore the stigmata of its own Calvary. I see 
the fossils of past virtue in a mummy-pit, because I 
find there the same organization into which our virtue 
flows. It was a temple of God : the brain has been 
scooped out, but the hollow once echoed with the 
invitation to be just and pure. 

At the annual celebrations of the Eleusinian Myste- 
ry, the spectators were reminded of the innocence their 
souls should crave, by a choir of little children clad 
in white garments and bearing doves. So Jesus 
u called a little child unto him and set him in the midst 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. IO3 

of them." What is the difference? All symbols and 
gestures have announced God's identity : and never 
more so than on that December day, when John 
Brown, on the way to crucifixion, laid his hand upon 
the little child of the slave-mother, and blessed it. 
The kingdom of heaven has been the Mystery-Play 
of all countries and ages, and its unalterable text is 
the soul of man. 

When Jesus challenged his sectarian accusers by 
offering his personal character as the test of his doc- 
trine, he said : " Which of you convinceth me of sin? 
and if I say the truth why do ye not believe me?" 
They all replied, " Say we not well that thou art a 
Samaritan and hast a devil?" For it always appears 
to a sectarian that a man is an infidel as soon as he 
proposes faithfulness to God instead of to doctrines. 
But when Jesus answered : " I have not a devil, but I 
honor my Father : if I honor myself, my honor is noth- 
ing : it is my Father that honoreth me ; of whom ye 
say that he is your God : and if I should say I know 
him not, I shall be a liar like unto you," — -his words 
were no more sublime with confidence in the eternity 
of divine truth, than those which Theodore Parker 
uttered in the faces of his clerical enemies who sup- 
ported the Fugitive Slave Bill : " You have called me 
Infidel. Surely I differ widely enough from you in 
my theology. But there is one thing I cannot fail to 
trust: that is the Infinite God, Father of the white 
man, Father also of the white man's slave. I should 
not dare violate his laws, come what may come, 
should you? Nay, I can love nothing so well as I 
love my God." The men who hated him still live 



104 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

to see what his longing eyes could not see, how 
greatly the Father has honored him by the destruc- 
tion of all the enactments of slavery ; and they bear 
a grudging testimony, when it is safe to do it, to 
the inspiration of his moral sense which, while he 
lived among them, they always hurried to revile. No 
flowers can bloom upon his grave in Florence so 
handsome and fragrant as our grateful recollections 
of the manliness that clung to God. While other 
powerful intelligences went overboard, lashed for 
safety to the frail spars of tradition, and drowned upon 
their fragments of the wreck, to toss about for perpet- 
ual warning, he chose the principle of life, felt the 
warm clasp of God's hand through the whole stormy 
period, and feels it warm to-day. 

What a remarkable thing character has been in all > 
ages of the world. It is another kind of Revelation 
by which God incarnates his sense of moral weight, 
proportion and availability. It appears in men who 
have compelled the instincts of society to attend to 
them ; to be moulded in politics, philanthropy, the sci- 
ence of living ; who have reigned over tracts of moral 
feeling, from a neighborhood to a State, by virtue of 
some effluence that is not purely mental or spiritual, 
artistic or affectionate, but is a personality rather than 
a quality. Many of these men have been famous above 
other men of more distinguished attributes. Gold and 
diamonds are held in great repute, and always bring 
the highest price in the market. But a well-tempered 
bar of iron does all the work of mechanics, war and 
social intercourse. The whole world runs smoothly 
on it. Toughness, evenness of grain, uniformity of 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. IO5 

structure, and a happy temper, have been the advan- 
tage of character to all leaders of cliques, parties, 
founders of social and religious systems ; to all who 
have established codes and customs, and all men of 
weight in ordinary affairs. Isolated gifts are articles 
of luxury : this combination of mental and moral force 
in a healthy individual is the daily bread. Every age 
has people who are finer in some respects than its men 
of character. Louis Kossuth was more eloquent than 
all Hungary, eloquent as her wounds were. He seemed 
to be the tongue in every one of them to plead for 
liberty. What a touch of inspiration it was when he 
said in Faneuil Hall: " Cradle of Liberty? I do not 
like that phrase, — it savors too much of mortality " ! 
Liberty is indeed as old as God ; but Kossuth, who 
felt the truth, was not the man to give it to his country. 
He was not merely unfortunate : a greater thing than 
his ill-luck disabled him. He was only eloquent. If 
Russia had not interfered, nor Gorgey betrayed, muni- 
cipal usage and the rights of man would have left him 
for some one as whole, as balanced, as composed as 
Liberty itself is : one, perhaps, far inferior in senti- 
ment, and destitute of imagination, rounded in every 
part, towering in none, never politic but always sensi- 
ble ; whose earnestness could not lapse through the 
silvery sluices of his speech, but could lie molten in an 
ardent heart, alloyed with judgment and long-suffering : 
mobile enough not to impair the toughness of fibre 
that alone bears continual strains, and every part of 
the nature strengthened with such homeliness of convic- 
tion and plain sense of right as Abraham Lincoln had. 
We say that Kossuth was inspired. If we use that 

5* 



106 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

word to express a capacity to receive divine impres- 
sions, or to indicate by it only the felicity of an 
organization that can absorb all nature, literature and 
life, and persuasively reproduce them, why not apply 
the same word to this commanding excellence of char- 
acter, as we see it in Moses, Pythagoras, Phocion, 
Washington, Lincoln, Toussaint L'Ouverture, whose 
names represent a quality that is exercised with more 
or less notoriety in every neighborhood? Character is 
a plant of slow growth, because it draws from the soil 
and air so many elements, and has to be so deliberate 
in digesting them. A spire of asparagus will shoot 
aloft in a night. The sugar-cane hurries up its coveted 
sweetness through a frail pith that is nothing but a big 
straw. But teak and lignum-vitas, the oak and the 
cedar have out so many roots and claim toll from so 
many quarters towards their staunchness, that it is 
some time before they make a show. Then we go to 
sea in them with confidence. Character is a wood of 
dull grain, but capable of taking on a beautiful polish, 
because its sap runs from conscience, intelligence, feel- 
ing, the higher reason and the common sense ; from 
passion too, from a reserve of mighty indignation, from 
frankness and healthiness of all the impulses. If the 
divine life is not in such a product, that is. at once 
compact and manifold, inflexible and workable, a rare 
concurrence of so many attributes which we suppose to 
belong to God, where can the divine life be found at 
all? Not more in the intuitive morals of Socrates and 
Jesus, not more in those lines of Shakspeare that are 
one hearth where wit, wisdom and fancy all warm 
themselves together, not more when the orchestra of 



THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 107 

Beethoven becomes a pinion that takes us up from the 
dwindling earth to carry us off into a pervasive unity. 
The doctrine of chance accounts for nothing : does the 
doctrine of natural combination of elements, working 
by their independent tendency, account for any thing? 
Not for a single blade of grass. Elements cooperate, 
and various effects in every province of human life are 
observed. But what sustains cooperation, what pre- 
scribes the laws of mutuality and keeps a soul in them, 
what continually systematizes the system? James 
Watt, in his grimy workshop, poring over abortive 
models of the steam-engine, is a less striking sight than 
Michel Angelo on his back frescoing the ceiling of 
the Sistine Chapel, or Columbus steering for the New 
World through the mist of mutiny, or Paul on Mars' 
Hill, or Jesus on the Mount of Olives, or Leonidas 
blocking up Thermopylae. But what nourished the pa- 
tience and conviction of all these, or of none of them ? 
The Presence whose invisible things are clearly seen, 
being understood by the things that are made, even 
his eternal power and Godhead. 

Immanence is in all intuitive comprehension of all 
principles, or it is in none. It exists in all character- 
istic excellencies, or it cannot be found in any. If you 
use the word to account for a moral utterance, or a 
prophetic feeling, you involve yourself in its use to 
account for all human genius that constructs, restores, 
beautifies, ennobles, comforts and restrains. The moral 
law runs into all these products and makes them relig- 
ious. They are all texts of the continual Scripture. 
If a special excellence has attracted your attention, it 
does not follow that it is an isolated and exceptional 



IOS AMERICAN RELIGION. 

thing. It is part of the beaming of the day. You may- 
put up your hands at each side of your eyes to view 
it better, but you cannot thus make a division in the 
daylight : it is all around the fingers, and shows them, 
too, ruddy with their blood. 

Must not the Whole at every moment be God for that 
moment? Is he present here and absent there, more 
interested in Jerusalem than in Rome, with a partiality 
for one man above another •? His Moral Law makes all 
men of one blood, and inspires the whole positiveness 
of their life. 

Let us escape from all ordinances and enclosures, 
and fasten to the bosom of God instead of to the faucet 
of a sect. Let us trust ourselves in the open weather 
that makes our souls robust with the air and sunshine 
of heaven. 



V. 

LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 

THE individual applies directly to the source of all 
power, but all the past which he contains is in- 
volved in this application and helps him make it, 
whether the direction which he takes be science, art, 
imagination, morals, or religion. He may become 
a new inventor or prophet, but not the same as if he 
had been one of the helpers of the reign of Menes, or 
as if Egyptian civilization had not become extinct. 
He begins where it left off, even if he only reproduces 
one of its lost arts. He does it with a fresh advantage, 
and his position is readily seen in some fineness of de- 
tail or added convenience. His monolith may be no 
larger, but steam moves it for him, and dispenses with 
thousands of hands and hours for other work. His 
tools cleave no more exactly than the long row of 
wooden pegs saturated with water ; but the economy 
to which he has attained is seen in the quantity of 
manhood that is saved for innumerable kindred labors. 
He supplements all the triumphs of culture with the 
sacredness of the individual. 

But what is meant by saying that the individual ap- 
plies directly to the source of all power ? The answer 
to this question involves points that must be carefully 



IIO AMERICAN RELIGION. 

stated and developed, with some attention to the value 
of language, that no terms may be used which convey 
only notions, those unballasted and pilotless sailors of 
the air. 

As scientific subjects were much hampered by the 
predilection of the Greeks for phrases, so this subject 
of Inspiration is obscured by notions derived from 
Biblical language. The people of the Bible assume 
to have received definite messages from the Lord. So 
when the theologian finds distinct sentences thus la- 
belled, whether the subject-matter be to extirpate a 
race or to found one, to overreach a Philistine, or 
whatsoever questionable proceeding may have fur- 
therance for the chosen people in it, these, as well as 
more manly and spiritual utterances, help him to con- 
struct a theory that the Lord declares himself by voice, 
symbol or sign, dream, suggestion, prophetic message. 
We have insensibly imbibed the habit of expecting 
communication as a test of divine activity : definite 
statements, or irruptions of thinking and feeling, must 
announce that it is at hand. But in-breathing is sim- 
ply continuous presence. It is the sustained evolution 
of all natures and species by means of their appropriate 
organization. 

This is not a doctrine of mere pantheistic imma- 
nence, which leaves us irresponsible products of a 
Force or a Life, or reduces us to be terms of predesti- 
nation, incapable of independent activity. Our organ- 
ization is the very thing that interferes to prevent this, 
by announcing a conscience ; that is, we become con- 
scious of a sense that says to us, /ought ; /ought not. 
The in-breathing nourishes the sense of a responsible /. 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 1 1 E 

f The immanence of the divine Person does not become 
individualized till this sense of the /is reached. Then 
the I saves its freedom, and increases it by an act 
which at first might seem to annihilate it ; that is, by 
admitting all of the divine in-being possible : and this 
is an educable process, and may arrive at high perfec- 
tion. The individual himself is the result of the con- 
scious and unconscious cooperation of the past with 
the divine presence, and when he appears he is a cen- 
tre where this process meets to carry forward its career. 
And he becomes free in proportion as he surrenders 
himself to this divine in-being, which is the only per- 
fect freedom because it is coordinated by the universal 
laws. 

The vegetable and animal kingdoms betray the fore- 
feeling of this destiny. It can be detected on the fron- 
tier between both, where we are uncertain if an object 
be a plant or an animal. The object solves the doubt 
by a vague and distant hint of the quality that belongs 
to human choice. Mr. Waterhouse Hawkins says that 
a friend of his had for some years a sea-anemone in 
an aquarium, which would receive its food from the 
hands of its owner, but never from Hawkins's hands, 
though he had a hundred times made the experiment 
of endeavoring to feed it. Here is not merely percep- 
tion for food, but a comparing, a distinguishing sensi- 
bility, a choice in the mode of taking it, belonging to 
an object the least likely, in our estimation, to show it. 
But the plants, also, accept the elements that favor 
their individuality, and reject the unsuitable. Potatoes 
in a cellar will put forth their bleached shoots towards 
the single window that admits the light ; the process 



112 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

is dual : at one end a potato, at the other end a sun. A 
Rhode-Island apple-tree became aware, by a subter- 
ranean inkling, that the body of Roger Williams, 
though buried at a considerable distance in the or 
chard, might be reached with effort and patience. So 
it put forth a root in that direction, ignoring every 
other, and struck through the decaying coffin to the 
skull of the great champion of religious liberty, as if 
to absorb that advantage into New-England's symbolic 
fruit. Thence it spread in a fine net-work of fibre over 
every member of the body, and eventually transferred 
its whole nutriment into successive crops of pippin or 
russet, leaving a perfect cast of it, done in that silent 
modelling, for the Historical Society. 

How is such an instinct related to the universal Life ? 
Certainly Deity cannot be a ghoul, reduced to grubbing 
up graves for a livelihood : nevertheless we can ac- 
cept the facts to indicate that In-being appears in 
plant life and physical life, as well as in mind and 
conscience. But it is necessary to find some distinc- 
tion between the two manifestations. The physical 
functions of the plant and animal are taken up by the 
human body and carried on : they include involuntary 
vital acts and the whole economy of the organization. 
They also take a prominent part in that condition of 
our ordinary life which lies between physical functions 
and the mental and intuitive forms of our individuality ; 
that stirring, choring, bustling, mimicing, gossiping, 
and striving ; that indifferent intercourse of people that 
reproduces the habits of instinct, and swarms in the 
basement over which the mind entertains illustrious 
guests. 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 113 

There is no point of the whole scale from which 
the divine in-being has retreated ; it nourishes all, but 
the simpler the organization the less the freedom. The 
relation of the lower forms of life to the immanence 
is simple necessity. As the structure becomes com- 
plicated, and opens more gates to the creative energy, 
the necessity, to our surprise, diminishes, just when 
we should expect to find it confirmed and intensified 
by this increase of absolute life. The object, instead 
of being swamped by taking on board so much from 
beyond itself, rides more freely. Dead weight is ex- 
panded into buoyancy. It is because it receives more 
of the divine freedom. The object arrests, and gives 
a hint of, this tendency of absolute life towards a liber- 
ation of itself into higher forms. We see that it is not 
taking the direction of imprisonment for itself, or of 
threatening abject servitude for individuals ; and we 
trace it by ever widening avenues of law as it escapes 
from legal necessity into those human functions which 
report the sense of an I. Its culminating in that place 
or relation is an act that leaves both free : the one 
remains God, the other becomes Man. The conscience 
is the highest reach of this, and its ought justifies and 
explains the whole advance in freedom. 

What an earnest expectation of this topmost result 
is announced by the first faint tokens of life in the de- 
velopment of created things. We know what purpose 
animated every stage of creation by the consciousness 
into which we have developed. The lapse of time \f 
from the moment of the simplest cell and the minutest 
motion to the present hour is rehearsed in us. We are 
the sum of it, and are therefore capable of imagining 



114 AMERICAN RELIGION-. 

the rapture which flew into every fresh form of life, 
as the divine composer, summoning instrument after 
instrument into his harmony, climbed with his theme 
from those that offered but a single note to those that 
exhaust the complexity of thought and feeling, to com- 
bine them into expression, kindling through hints, 
phrases, sudden concords, mustering consents of many 
wills, releases of each one's felicity into comradeship, 
till the sweet tumult becomes his champion, and 
bursts into the acclaim of a whole world : " I ought — 
so then I will." The toppling instruments concur, be- 
come the wave that touches that high moment, lifts 
the whole deep and holds it there. 

The intellect has its share in that unity of conscious- 
ness, and brings to the front of knowledge the method 
of laws which have gradually set it apart from the 
worlds beneath it to become a Person. Then science 
is possible, and the mind becomes its own interpreter. 
The right method of thinking is part of the divine con- 
tinuity ; it is sure to displace, eventually, all arbitrary 
or superstitious methods, because these are only ar- 
rested stages of itself, or its imperfectly apprehended 
drift, distorted rays through the prism which mankind 
has not yet learned to hold. 

It seems that the in-being of God has been observed 
sooner in the conscience than in the intellect. This is 
because the intellect has inherited so many complex 
sensations, and is embarrassed by its own attempts at 
knowing a world which does not instantly declare its 
secrets. So there is a process of observation and de- 
duction that is not identical with the process of crea- 
tion. The infinite intelligence seems to have retreated 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 115 

from the confusion, or to appear not to care to be un- 
derstood. At what point of direct contact dare we 
maintain that the divine in-being is? 

Intellect splits into manifold inventiveness, and gives 
birth to the different kinds of intelligences. The divine 
manifoldness appears as Gift. It is no objection that 
isolated gifts may be exercised unconsciously. There 
is a great range from automatic cerebral action to the 
synthesis of the highest minds, as they consciously 
gather from all parts of creation the effects which 
betray the mode of the divine operation, and how 
every thing is correlated and coheres. The higher this 
synthesis, or putting together, the greater is the in- 
being of the mind that thus declares itself in a kindred 
intelligence. It may mount into an intuitive feeling of 
law, that is like, and coequal with, the sense of abso- 
lute Ought and Ought Not, and involves a conscious- 
ness of being part of an infinite Person. For it defers 
to the order of the universe, to its intellectual method, 
to its synthesis of forces. The more it bends thus to 
the great centres that seek and draw it, the less indi- 
vidual it feels, because it no longer adheres to partial 
and transitional shifts, and is not detained by conceit 
for them. The I becomes freer with every aban- 
donment to this organic closeness of God, till it can 
exclaim with Kepler, " I think Thy thoughts after 
Thee ! " 

This intuitive apprehension of the drift of facts and 
of phenomena is immanence of the Mind that is nour- 
ishing the facts. Creating becomes interpreting, and 
breaks into speech through things that are made. 

For if the phenomena that are thus interpreted do 



Il6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

not result from any fortuitous concourse of atoms, but 
rather betray mind by their regularity and persistence, 
age after age, in every quarter of the universe where 
observation can reach them, the interpretation must, 
a fortiori, betray the presence of mind. The finite 
intelligence is then a fact or phenomenon with the 
infinite mind in contact with it. 

No matter if the finite mind is unconscious of this 
vitalizing proximity, or denies it altogether in favor of 
some theory of organic action of the individual as an 
effect of forces. The denial only pushes the vitality 
one step to the rear, and leaves it in a place where it 
must apply to its real base for nourishment or perish. 
And the unconsciousness of a scientific mind that it is 
so sustained by the in-being of a divine mind cannot 
be alleged against the real closeness of that Mind. As 
well might the failure of a plant or animal to appre- 
hend the great fact be held sufficient to deny it : for all 
objects, including men, are recipients of more life than 
they refer to its source. The organization becomes 
the measure and tool of it without finding self-reflec- 
tion and analysis essential, or without pushing it far 
enough to discover a personal Will that belongs to a 
divine intelligence. 

A habit is quite prevalent among scientific men who 
stand closest to the real order of the world, and who 
are emancipating us from old phrases and methods, to 
refer all phenomena to Force, or to hold the general 
idea of Cause without caring to suppose it Person or 
to attribute to it a direct and continuous contact with 
all objects through the channels of their laws. This in- 
difference of science may exist in minds which are the 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. Il7 

most thoroughly inspired by the rational order of 
Mature, the most conscientious and self-sacrificing to 
pursue its results, the most courageous to combat su- 
perstitions, and without even mentioning the name of 
Jod. Their fidelity is none the less divinely sustained 
because they are not conscious that it is, or do not care 
whether it is or not. Their experiments pursue a 
phenomenon to its remotest coverts by the sure trail of 
the natural scent it leaves : nothing turns them aside 
or throws them off/ Right mental method puts them 
on the track of the law of the object, and that is enough 
for them. They will devote a life to the noble worship 
of pursuing, and deem it irrelevant or superfluous to 
be called off to talk about the divine immanence, and 
to set up the necessity of being supplied with a per- 
sonal God. But their Truth is God, their Force is 
him also, their invariable Law is the proclamation of 
his nearness, and their subtle facts the hints he gives 
of directions favorable to pursue. 

This is the position of many foreign men of science, 
who are doing such a noble work in importing the 
real methods, of the universe into every branch of 
knowledge. Their language frequently presumes an 
indifference which they do not feel ; for they hold 
it to be a sacred duty to confine phrases to the busi- 
ness they have in hand, which is* that of detecting 
and preserving specimens of the actual processes of 
creation. Their rapture goes forth in that direction ; 
they point you to marks of a wonderful footstep, and 
kindle with their whole nature full of intuition as they 
see and declare to you how all feet fit into it, and how 
all things must have passed that way. No more relig- 



Il8 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

ions attitude can be conceived : for religion is recog- 
nition of central facts, the confinement of effects to the 
lines of causality, the emancipation of mankind from 
ignorance and false habits, and the reconciliation of 
all knowledge to invisible Truth. 

It is only when the scientific mind goes out of this 
professional neutrality of expression to make its facts 
deny Intelligence and Will that it becomes irreligious, 
because then instead of conciliating facts with causes 
it divorces them, and leaves all certitude at the mercy 
of a phrase. They repeat the error of the theologians, 
and land us, however correct their methods of experi- 
ment and observation may be, in a notion : it is either 
Correlation, Protoplasm, or some other substitute for 
the old metaphysics, but no improvement on them as 
statements of final and efficient cause. So long as 
these phrases are honestly held to represent the points 
which the mind has reached, and the tentative process 
which gathers and coordinates the greatest number of 
phenomena, with no pretence to impose a finality nor 
to claim that there is nothing more beyond, the scien- 
tific man may be praised for his temperate and impar- 
tial speech. Many shall cry, Lord, Lord ! out of mere 
custom of causation, and be no more conscious of 
In-being than the men who declare that they are con- 
scious of nothing but method. 

But, we repeat, this unconsciousness of the scientific 
intellect is not damaging to the fact that God inheres 
in its method, and is the breath of its suggestions. 
Individual consciousness is not essential to this vitaliz- 
ing presence : it need not be the continuous nor the 
occasional result of it. This question has been much 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. II9 

embarrassed by two theological errors : that man must 
live in a state of personal experience of Omnipres- 
ence, and that communication is its favorite way to be 
announced and recognized. But the divine mind ap- 
pears as Gift ; its fulness becomes ultimated thus in 
man, as all animate and inanimate things describe its 
freshest expressions. If it communicates, it is by the 
advantages of structure. Many degrees of this exist 
with more or less accompaniment of consciousness. 
Most commonly the consciousness is confined to those 
rare moments when the gift blossoms into fruition, 
when moments of success impend, when experiences 
accumulate around a soul's point, and a thrill of re- 
cognition passes, a consent of receptivity, unspoken, 
or vocal with all the praises that the imagination, as it 
fills with the blood of the hour's great pulse, may 
lavish on it. 

The man who calls himself an atheist and derides 
the sentimentalism of communion with God, honestly 
declaring that no such fact ever entered into his con- 
sciousness, is a better testimony to an indwelling Deity 
than the crowds of pietists who try to inflate themselves 
with the wind of phrases into a state of continual dis- 
tention with Omnipresence, because they are forcing 
their structure beyond its organic ability, while he is 
sincere enough to state exactly how far the structure in 
his case repeats any such experience. For in-being, 
though of a transcendent essence, does not choose to 
transcend any structure which it brings down by inheri- 
tance and sustains ; our authority for saying this is the 
structure itself, which cannot give any other account 
of its existence. And one structure can transcend 



120 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

another only on the strength of the in-being that strictly 
corresponds to both. After a shell has once been cast 
and filled, there is no way of increasing the latent 
capacity of the charge which it contains. It soars to 
heights and drops at distances that chronicle its calibre. 
So that if a man truly reports absence of any sense of 
God, he does not report absence of God, but presence 
of God in the sincerity which makes known a structu- 
ral defect. His state of divineness is superior to that 
of the religionists who assume a sense of God because 
no respectable family can be without it. Great num- 
bers of people attribute consciousness of God to con- 
ventional emotions which are warmed by religious 
exercises into semblance of organic life. Nothing is 
nearer to them than their spurious, sectarian self. At 
best they only labor to reproduce or to imitate some 
vanished moment of profound experience, when life or 
death was surprised listening at the door. The com- 
mon belief in a God is compounded of thought and 
emotion, but a perception of God is generally only an 
intellectual assent in the interest of causation. For 
people differ considerably in the faculty to condense 
the latent God into personal consciousness, just as they 
differ in ability to state in prose or hymn the condition 
itself when it arrives. With the great majority of peo- 
ple it never passes beyond the satisfaction which moral 
triumphs bring. When the organization asserts itself 
by normal acts in any direction, and a function is ap- 
peased, the light heart praises the moment and enjoys 
its health. The mystics insist that all mankind shall 
make pretence to more than this, and they encourage 
cerebral exaltations by voting them to be influxes of 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 121 

the invisible. Like the alchemist and the astrologer, 
they have fooled the world with fancies. An iron 
kettle cannot be transmuted into gold, and the stars in 
their courses never took the trouble to fight with or 
against Sisera. 

But it is none the less a mental necessity to accept 
the in-being of Will and Intelligence. No assumptions 
that consciousness and communication are or are not 
vital experimental facts can affect this necessary atti- 
tude of derived intelligence. The scientific man may be 
only calling it by other names, so long as he is uncon- 
scious of the reputed experiences of the theological 
world. If a mind can see the drift of all the phenom- 
ena that are continuously nourished and put forth for 
observation, it must account for its ability to see the 
drift. How can it detect the law of the plant except 
by means of the plant's law ? As soon as the mind 
perceives the absence of chance from the minutest turn 
and stage of the development of species, it is aware 
that it perceives this by means of intelligent purpose 
imported into itself; it submits to this general intelli- 
gence, and lives with all other created things immedi- 
ately from the Will which it embodies. But the mind 
refuses to expect communication because itself is an 
organized test of In-being. 

Inventions and discoveries which increase our 
knowledge are generally accumulations of a tendency 
towards them that has controlled a number of minds, 
perhaps for generations. Gifted persons contribute a 
surmise, a detail, an imperfect experiment : their lives 
are haunted with such a strong probability that they 
put forth repeated efforts in its direction, abandon it, 

6 



122 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

recur to it, and slowly educate the general thinking, 
so that fresh minds take up the matter at an advantage, 
furnish more probability, break through here and there 
into the daylight, and bequeath at least encourage- 
ment to their successors. Not a hint is ever lost. 
If separate families of cultivated men do not transmit 
it, the republic of letters keeps it perpetually on file, 
where a kindred mind, consulting the achievements of 
the race, is sure to find it. The special thought is 
rekindled, and at length all hearths are furnished with 
its comfort. So Gift is slow in elaborating its prefer- 
ences. Its growth is often checked, and the earth's 
climate appears inclement. But the hardy fruit is 
favored by these suspenses, and acquires firmness and 
flavor. The In-being that allowed some millions of 
years for making balls of sun-sand can be patient 
while relays of minds are condensing the matter of 
knowledge, to set fresh surprises rolling in our sky. 
It consumes as much time to interpret a world as to 
make it. 

So all the laws which lead to science and invention 
have a history. The discovery of the laws of motion 
must correct the crude ideas of Aristotle, and prepare 
for Newton, who supplements them with the five 
truths of gravitation, and drives out of the heavens 
the epicycles of Ptolemy and the vortices of Descartes. 
That apple was two thousand years in falling. The 
law of refraction precedes the law of polarization, 
and there must be a theory of caloric to disappoint 
men and pique them to discover that heat is but a 
mode of motion. Linnaeus classifies plants and de- 
scribes the characters and functions of e*ich part oi 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 1 23 

them, before Goethe can perceive that all the parts 
are metamorphoses of the same primitive member. 
Humboldt and other travellers observe the variation of 
the compass and the dip of the needle on so many 
spots of the earth's surface, that the facts suggest to 
several minds at once the theory of a magnetic equator 
and of magnetic poles ; but the right man has not yet 
appeared to convert the conjecture into science. Be- 
fore Dalton, seeking for a law of chemical combina- 
tion, can speak of atomic weights, Wollaston must 
treat atoms as chemical equivalents, and Davy must 
investigate their proportions. After Dalton has fin- 
ished a neglected life, Faraday finds himself well 
equipped to give each elementary substance a number 
which expresses the relative amount of its decompo- 
sition ; he calls it " electro-chemical equivalent," and 
the identity of electrical and chemical action is at last 
attained. 

Oken stumbles over a deer's skeleton, and picks up 
the sudden suggestion that a skull is an expanded 
vertebra ; a frog's leg has a spasm when a Galvani 
happens to be standing near ; Franklin's knuckle draws 
the first spark from the fact of an electrical equilibri- 
um : but long periods of tentative experiment pre- 
pared all these and similar lucky moments. It seems 
that the original plan to have pterodactylic and sau- 
rian forerunners of all compact and economical forms 
reigns also in the domain of thought. But theories 
sprawl towards symmetry, and the divine mind is 
content with the direction. The results surprise igno- 
ance, and seem to have arrived by "legerdemain ; but 
all discoverers know best how gradually conjecture 



V 



124 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

has reached their consciousness of Law through brain- 
cells modified for centuries. Man grows till his hand 
can reach the latch ; it is a simple motion, then, to 
enter. And throughout the whole development, it 
was In-being which made it impossible for a New- 
ton to precede Pythagoras, Beethoven a Terpander, 
Shakspeare a Homer. In-being, then, controlled each 
point of the vast line. 

When the growth ripens, Galileo invents a tele- 
scope, Watt a steam-engine, Goethe discovers Morph- 
ology ; Alexander Braun could not earlier have drawn 
up his first formula of Phyllotaxis, or the fractional 
ratio of the spiral ascent of leaves around a stem ; 
and Prof. Peirce must wait to hear of that before his 
brain can build into the suggestion that the same frac- 
tions are approximate expressions of the relative times 
of rotation of the planets. The Mind that has so long 
plotted and constructed on the scale of an infinite 
fraction, which these approximately express, finally 
lets out the secret. What other mind has shared it? 
There is no technical communication, because the 
mental structure touches the law with the felicity to 
which it has attained. 

God either is or is not immanent in this. Many 
scientific men imply that the whole suite of phe- 
nomena lay packed in the first germs of life. The 
theory is, that primitive matter was endowed with 
everything that has since happened : all forms, all 
creatures, all developments of thought, have been 
evolutions, by regular stages and a discernible logic, 
from points of matter that were also points of forces 
chartered by Intelligence for this voyage of history, 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 1 25 

to set down instalments at successive ports ; opening 
fresh instructions but receiving no fresh ones, every- 
thing having been anticipated and put on board be- 
fore the start. Science appears to favor this theory 
for two reasons : it obviates the necessity of importing 
a Creator all along the route, to superintend modifica- 
tions and contrive fresh species ; for this trotting in 
and out of a divine intervention, so dear to theology, 
is very repugnant to the men of Law. Another rea- 
son is, that the uses to which theology has put the idea 
of Omnipresence, to sustain miraculous irruptions, 
special providences and communications, has also dis- 
gusted the scientific mind, which is impressed by the 
spectacle of a providence that is continuity and uni- 
formity of causation. It refuses, in short, to be guided 
by the assumption of a meddlesome and capricious 
incoming, as of some one who has afterthoughts, and 
desires to change his mind or modify the results of 
forces ; who is constantly picking at his own works, 
because he discovers that unless he is on the ground 
there is no help to convert a scale into a feather, gills 
into lungs, flippers into hands ; that everything turns 
out to have the fatal defect that it is unable to go 
alone, and that man himself cannot add a pin-feather 
to a pigeon's leg, or modify its throat, unless Allmight- 
iness is on the spot. 

The tendency to concede great results to the latency 
of forces gathered at points of matter is a reaction 
from the fetichism of theology. It is no wonder that 
minds, which are drenched with the sense of an orderly 
and gradual development of objects by minute changes 
through vast periods, should not be able to contain a 



126 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

drop of the dregs in the old cup of supernaturalism. 
Let the savage vivify his calabash and necklace of 
teeth with a god, if he pleases. Science prefers a 
God large enough, and of intelligence comprehen- 
sive enough, to be remanded back into eternity, 
where the first plastic germ and the last thinking 
soul occupy, with all that transpires between, but 
a breath or instant which is the everlasting Now. 
To Him, whose watch-tick is our millions of years 
just on the point of striking, what is the zeal of 
the theologian to import Omnipresence into his petty 
pulpit spasm ; what the intent of the naturalist to 
confine it to the origins of species, or of the his- 
torian to chain this watch-dog to the threshold of 
epochs? 

And we must concede that science makes out its 
case in favor of potential forces that cluster at points 
of matter, travel through their combinations, are cor- 
related or opposed, and waltz in and out of each other 
in endless masquerade. Definite physical conditions 
draw after them invariable demonstrations of power 
and vitality. When the brakes are applied to the 
wheels of a train, and their motion disappears, where 
is it? It is liberated into the form of heat. What is 
the philosophy of this simple transaction? Something 
has taken place : there has been a manifestation of 
elemental law. Did God shift from motion into heat, 
and wait there to be brought round to motion-making 
processes again? Was he watching the brakeman's 
arm that he might be on time, and free his heat 
from his motion? No, says Science: no God took 
passage by that train. The most we can believe is 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 12*] 

that the first infinite Fulness precontained the invaria- 
ble correlation. 

That is the least we can believe. No matter at 
how many removes, interpose as many of them as 
we please, the fact must at last be due to something. 
A man may pick his teeth, a bird may preen its 
feathers, an insect may acquire the protection of its 
color, without the co-presence of Deity. We do not 
know the extent to which the creative mind econo- 
mizes its relation to things, and turns them over to its 
practised menials. There must be dignity as well as 
frugality of Omnipresence. But the trivial occurrence 
between the brake and the wheel* has range enough to 
invite co-presence ; and that is not intervention. Per- 
haps no other fact could so well indicate the vast 
and incessant shifting of motion into other elemental 
conditions, to keep up the interplay of laws upon the 
scale of a universe. The slight local flitting of motion 
into heat, under the turn of a brakeman's muscle, is 
like the bent twig, or the pressed grass-blade, that 
betrays to the trapper which way his game has passed 
on its long route through apparently deserted forests. 
It is a flicker of expression upon an infinite counte- 
nance, where all the moods of creation disport them- 
selves : now and then a side-long glance detains our 
conscious observation, but it is significant of spaces 
over which all the eyes in all the planets could not 
be concentrated to report one great occurrence, and 
all intelligences could not overtake its manifoldness. 
But show us a stick whose weather-side has been 
turned under, or an abraded tree-bark, and we can 
satisfy ourselves that a wildness takes to covert and 
invites us to pursue. 



128 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

" Malo me Galatea petit — 
Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri : M 

towards me Galatea tosses an apple, then she flies to 
the willow-clumps, wishing that my glance may fol- 
low. The apple is expressive enough, though we are 
not detained by its flavor, because Galatea throws it 
only to provoke us to leave it for herself. 

To say that acts of correlation were precalculated, 
precontained, is a mere phrase which accounts for 
nothing but only relegates them to primordial germs. 
If, to relieve this from being only a notion, one says 
that the germs started to travel with the fulness in 
every direction till there became a universe, he right- 
fully says that the Infinite passed into representation 
by a universe : it accompanied its germs into action. 
What else can it be doing, indeed, except being every 
point of space in every moment of time? He says, 
what he ought to say, that In-being is the immediate 
cause of all phenomena, which occur to us in a series 
of years, and in a logically graduated method, but oc- 
cur to God in an eternal moment. For time and space 
form only a " provisional cuticle " for mind in its finite 
condition. 

" He glows above 
With scarce an intervention, presses close 
And palpitatingly, His soul o'er ours ! 
We feel Him, nor by painful reason know! 
The everlasting minute of creation 
Is felt there ; Now it is, as it was Then ; 
All changes at His instantaneous will, 
Not by the operation of a law 
Whose maker is elsewhere at other work ! 
His soul is still engaged upon his world." 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 1 29 

But when Mr. Browning adds, — 

"Man's praise can forward it, man's prayer suspend, 
For is not God all-mighty?" 

he fancies God not so mighty as to be independent of 
the ejaculations into which man's joy or grief tran- 
spires. God's co-presence, with all finite structures, 
might diminish the bulk of dictionaries, and ease 
bodies of divinity of groaning on our shelves. 

Man's deeds can forward it, but the bad ones seem 
to have been in the long run quite as providential as 
the good. How bad were they, then ? 

Now we say, Watt invents a steam-engine, Goethe 
discovers Morphology. There either is or is not di- 
vine in-being in the structures which reach these results. 
Why is there not, if there is in the plant? The plant 
draws sap in this eternal moment of creation, not by 
its own device, but in the stress of the moment. It 
has not concluded to be a jonquil, a tulip, a violet. 
Does a combination of earths and forces qualify its 
name? Then what qualifies the combination? Is it 
a primitive fancy of form and color, packed into a 
monad of matter, left to burst out eventually in our 
meadow, as a firework's changes blaze out and into 
each other, and dispense with the original fusee clear 
through its combinations? Then every thing has got 
everywhere, and extruded, if not abolished, its own 
Creator. At the least, he has stepped aside, as a man 
who lights his firework, and he has attained through 
all these millions of years to the function of being su- 
perfluous. The primordial germs emptied out all his 
infinity, and his first creative act was fatal to him 

6* 



I30 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Perhaps this splendid moth of the Cosmos may yet 
alight upon the deserted cocoon.' 

Immanence has not displaced Watt's mentality, and 
dropped into him with the idea of Engine : for in that 
case he would be himself an engine with the steam 
turned on. How shall we save ourselves from this pan- 
theistic absorption, and save the immanence that nour- 
ishes the individual structure ? By recurring to the idea 
previously expressed that the self- working /attains to 
freedom through contact with the Immanence. We 
may say that Watt is immersed in it, but as an indi- 
vidual with a definite habit of structure, that evolves 
Immanence into special ideas and forms. His invent- 
iveness is his special freedom in Immanence. And in 
his freedom Immanence obeys and preserves its own. 
It is continuous and not irruptional, and is related to 
Watt in the universal character of designer and main- 
tainer of structure. Watt is not a free person who is 
occasionally controlled, enriched by a suggestion, 
domineered by a divine moment, thrown into abeyance 
by the intrusion of Immanence with its details of an 
engine. But he is a person whose gift acquires its 
freedom in compatibility with, as well as in conse- 
quence of, its contact with the Immanence ; and it is 
the law or natural disposition of this Immanence to 
reach finite freedom in this way. Watt's speciality, 
Goethe's deductive sense, is a hint or partial forth- 
setting of the absolute freedom that Immanence has 
by virtue of containing absolute Law. And the free- 
dom of each man is in proportion to the content of 
his speciality. 

If a doubt arises that mere phrasing and verbal 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 131 

jugglery is here engaged in holding off Immanence to 
keep human freedom inviolate, and then in turning it 
on to keep the freedom nourished, and so to balance 
the terms as to create an abstract notion of such an 
union or free interplay of structure and in-being, the 
doubt is dispelled by recurring to the actions of the soul 
that announce its highest sense of a conscience. Mill- 
ions of the humblest men supply this important ratifi- 
cation. In that resort, where a feeling of dependence 
and of individuality mingle and flow forth into a con- 
ception of a divine source of truth, we recover the 
value of the phrases we have used, and renew our 
belief that they represent a vital fact. We may be 
unable to get any farther than this in attempting to 
account for two freedoms in contact and yet compati- 
ble, for a finite structure that develops Gift out of 
in-being, and yet remains an individual. There is a 
point here that surpasses the kind of observation which 
enjoys the benefit of being explained. Nevertheless, it 
is none the less essential to the coherence of all human 
knowledge and experience. 

We say, then, that the broodings and developments 
of genius result from the divine continuousness in the 
partial freedoms of the men of genius. The whole 
line of their inheritance represents the course of this 
continuousness, freighted with the purport of the lyric, 
the symphony, the intuition of a law, the cunning of 
machines to catch and utilize the elements. No point 
of freedom in the long route was infringed with a view 
to these results. And when the men arrive, the con- 
tinuity has arrived also, to sustain and not to displace 
the I of each, as it develops its peculiar felicity. Its 



132 



AMERICAN RELIGION. 



trials, agonies, and private difficulties are not abro- 
gated. There is no infinite arrogance of overcoming 
and displacement, no infinite fussiness pulling at the 
sleeve, no pressing of superfluous assistance. For 
the structure of the individual stands built in the fore- 
thought of centuries. The I loses not one function, 
nor one disability, by having its freedom out of the 
absolute freedom that is immanent. For its functions 
and disabilities are the result of both freedoms which 
have been long at work up to this day of Immanence's 
special mood to nourish, prolong, and transmit that 
special case. And the more freely the man exercises 
his function, to reduce his disabilities of birth and for- 
tune, the greater becomes his share of the absolute 
freedom. He is more Goethean, and less Goethe, 
than ever. But he is not simply Immanence, because 
he is Goethean. He is not a pipe for fluting. A pipe 
has no freedom ; it therefore has no relation to the 
mood of fluting, and fluting merely adapts and adopts 
it, blows it, lets it drop. It is dead all the time it is 
not fluted on. Goethe entertains the divine mind in 
Goethean fashion, and becomes thus a condition of its 
immanence. 

Does the whole of our special immanence, that by 
which we live in our physical and spiritual entireness, 
touch the whole of us at the same moment, as the 
brine excites all the tentacles of the star-fish to lift 
and feed? If so, what is its state or mood, when any 
part of us suspends its function ? does it treat us like 
plants whose blossoms announce the climax of its 
visits, and droop to mark its stages of retreating? 
This would be a too mechanical representation of the 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 133 

interplay between structure and in-being. Our free- 
dom is its opportunity, into whatever gift and with 
whatever integrity of culture and exercise we invite it. 
But this inviting does not bring on submersion. It is 
only freedom conforming to the law which it derives 
from absolute freedom. Immanence corresponds to 
our spontaneousness, but the latter is not an arbitrary 
dictate of the former ; rather the success of the law 
of immanence, whose condition is to reach success 
through our law of freedom. 

When the delicately organized brain of the great 
thinker or poet receives the accumulating blood, and 
details it to the cells that are appropriate to the thought 
and emotion that gather and clamor at their portals to 
be liberated into expression, and fixed in brain-fibre 
and in speech at once and for ever, a sense of lifting, 
of light and gladness, penetrates such moments of cre- 
ativeness, to signalize that the soul's freedom has ad- 
mitted the whole of its in-being. The piled-up expe- 
rience does not report that some distant or exceptional 
inspiration has invaded the individual, and turned him 
into a mouth-piece for thought that would be otherwise 
impossible to him. The flashes and sudden illumina- 
tions are often held to be the accompaniments of divine 
influx ; and a lofty style of egotism, which is only con- 
sciousness of power, has been deceived, during many 
periods of the world's imperfect self-appreciation, 
into accepting these popular marks of the coming of 
God, and lending to the deceit all the intensity of per- 
sonal emotion. The heavens are opened, the wings 
rustle and descend, the eagle brings the electric pen 
in its talons, the sun of noonday is obscured by the 



134 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

lightning conviction, there is disparting, disspreading 
overhead, thinner and thinner grows the vault, and 
warmth and rapture rain through into a human ec- 
stasy. Is a fact of influx of a divine Person thus 
translated into the symbolic imagination of an indi- 
vidual, or is the latter simply set free into the ampli- 
tude and heat of his own structure's highest moment, 
as it invites and entertains all the absolute freedom 
that is normal to it? In this sense there is contact 
with a divine Person, but it is conditioned by inherited 
gifts of structure, advantages of culture, fineness of 
native fibre, build of the brain's complexity. The ex- 
perience of lifting and gladness is a moment of pure 
health, when the man fulfils his function with a bold 
and haughty ease ; it is a culmination of animal and 
mental spirits in the trains of thinking carried on by 
the individual. At last the solution comes, and gates 
swing open on hinges festally sounding, and the roof 
vibrates with its harmony. The cerebral action passes 
into emotion, light, and power, from a point that has 
been bulging with its life-tide till it can no longer be 
held there, but must pass to seek its equilibrium again. 
These are the moments magnified by the childlike 
surprise and egotistic humbleness of all the mystics, 
vision-seers, and special communicationists, into a 
supernaturalism that defies the laws of structure, and 
substitutes a caprice of its own. Theology is infested 
with its misleading phrases. 

If the evolution of thought and feeling depends, on 
the physical side, upon cerebral conditions, then, what- 
ever we suppose the resultant thought to be, as to its 
substance, may there not be a setting free of some- 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 135 

thing, as the cerebral contribution passes into the form 
of thinking? Why not, as in other modes of motion, 
an actual experience of light and warmth ? A smart 
blow upon the skull will let through into it a sky-full 
of stars : the concussion really imparts to the optic 
nerve the sense of flashes of light. There is some 
mode of physical activity whenever the gray matter of 
the brain gets so far as to arrange itself into a thought, 
and to fix it in a permanent form that is laid up for use 
and remembrance. When some fresh idea or emotion 
is secreted, and the personal experience receives it as 
a contribution to its structure, the moment of activity 
must have some kind of physical correlation. Whether 
thought be derived from the dual action of brain and 
mind, or whether it be only the brain's effervescence, 
we might expect in either case that the body's com- 
plicity would report itself in phenomena that corre- 
spond, in some kind of physical symbolism. It is not 
a groundless caprice that associates light with thought, 
warmth with emotion, obscurity and mist with mental 
groping, and a floating, airy joy with the success of 
every conviction. Nay ; the brain rises into its native 
health, even when there is no conscious interposition 
of a train of thought to help it climb : it fills with 
blood, and mantles into gladness. Suddenly, out of 
a neutral condition of the whole inward nature, 
something soars, like a lark from the meadow, and 
carols a surprise from an open vista, where just pre- 
viously we noticed nothing but a flat and opaque 
surface. 

And, certainly, the highest conscious moments of 
the soul cannot be all impalpable spirituality ; for the 



136 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

soul's moment is fructification, and that is a proceed- 
ing that depends upon two, upon the consummation 
of their marriage. The stigmas quiver to announce 
the pollen's touch* We shall probably find that all 
natural movements of the passing of one thing over 
into another sets free some element. 

When a blossom is unfolding, there is an increase 
of temperature that sometimes amounts to fifty de- 
grees ; the botanist would say that its purpose is to 
develop the seed. No doubt ; but the act of unfolding 
liberates this warmth that makes the act known to 
observation. 

Mr. Kingsley, writing from the tropics, says that, 
so fast does the spadix of flowers of the Monstera ex- 
pand, " an actual genial heat and fire of passion, 
which may be tested by the thermometer, or even by 
the hand, is given off during fructification." So, many 
a soul, journeying out of its debatable land, through 
passions of growth and self-conviction, is felled at 
noonday by excess of light, and overhears the last 
words of its perplexity and hesitation, as its own na- 
ture escapes from their persecution and assumes its 
rights. 

" Of a sudden it flashed through me," people say. 
The physical effect which accompanies vivid thinking, 
particularly where all the preliminary processes are 
condensed into one rapid moment, is thus preserved by 
language. It will yet be possible to measure this 
light and heat, these auroral flittings of the firmament 
of brain. 

Thought yearns and expects, when it is approaching 
its culmination, as feeling does. A solution, or a sug- 



LAW OF THE DIVINE IMMANENCE. 1 37 

gestion, is a direct answer from above only in the 
sense that the immanence corresponds to the whole 
process of freedom, and is fragrant in the flower 
thereof. These exalted states of feeling, deduction, 
revery, meditation, invention, and discovery, have 
often been misinterpreted into voice, message, special 
invasion of invisible agencies. Some temperaments 
are peculiarly susceptible to this delicate conceit 
of superior powers. There is a whole orchestral 
scale of it. A tune on the oboe is less subtle, pene- 
trating, soaring and personal, than the same tune 
upon the violin. It puts to the lips its celebration of 
meadow dainties, breathes the pensiveness of groves, 
is haunted by the wood-note of escaping Syrinx. But 
we hug the violin close to the human bosom that is a 
hive full of joy, terror, pity, and despair ; its seasoned 
freedom is offered to the heart's freedom, one vibration 
draws the line of immanence, thrills with fitness, but 
says nothing of conquest nor invasion. 

What shall prevent us from declaring that the divine 
in-being enjoys the raptures of these moments, when 
our partial freedom runs its flag up and reports suc- 
cesses : a field won, an advantage gained, an intrench- 
ment stormed ! Immanence must be in all liberations 
of vital force. The broader the finite freedom is, the 
more deeply the infinite is implicated. And as it is 
the implication of a personal will, it cannot be impas- 
sive. Our own joy is a gamut on the infinity of God ; 
and what is he but the perfect health of the universe, 
the only Being who does not fall sick with the evils 
that infest mankind, since they do not pertain to his 
absolute condition, but are mere contingents of devel- 



138 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

oping structure. Such irrepressible robustness cannot 
be conscious of defect. It is a divine impartiality that 
must be always glad. And every pure joy announces 
a mood of something that is prevalent in the vicinity : 
not a joy superposed or interpolated, but June, that 
" climbs to a soul in grass and flowers." 



VI. 

A DIVINE PERSON. 

WE have said that the tendency ot American Re- 
ligion should be to establish some necessary- 
truths that express real organic relations between the 
finite and the infinite. To force or pretend a belief in 
more than these would be to overload the soul with 
superfluous baggage. But to abandon any one of these 
would be to throw away a personal necessity. Whether 
man advances or retreats, the day's march is a strict 
commissary, and serves out exactly what he needs. 
The march is, indeed, the stubborn experience that dis- 
covers the rule of the commissariat. Before people 
start, they put up many a whimsey which they expect to 
find comfortable on occasion ; but a few peremptory 
days make them abandon these one after the other with 
sighs of regret which soon change to congratulations. 
In the old rambling mansion of theology, even the 
warming-pans and foot-stoves of shivering generations 
are hoarded up : now and then they are brought out to 
cosset some valetudinarian. But motion itself is the 
improved warming apparatus to an army in the field. 
The vital functions of the individual are his body of 
divinity ; they comprise the articles of his faith, and 
refer him to its objects. 



I40 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

We are prepared to see that a divine Person is an 
object that closely corresponds to necessities of the in- 
dividual, notwithstanding a wide feeling which exists, 
in circles where science or indifference disclaim them, 
that the organic evolution of Force does everybody's 
business with sufficient promptness, economy and ad- 
vantage. This evolution of force has not been denied 
by us ; it has, on the contrary, been assumed as the 
nerve-system that pervades the whole surface, but 
gathers into ganglia deep towards the centre where 
in-being;' touches and controls it. The law of in-being" 
depends upon its mediation through all the structures 
of the universe. 

But the in-being is not merely another force behind 
a force ; it must have essential Personality because all 
its manifestations presume intelligence and will. When 
the word Person is applied to the infinite being, it is 
apt to carry over the idea of limitation from our expe- 
rience of individuals. After we have called a man a 
person, we shrink from using the word to convey the 
conception that there is a vital consciousness in God, 
until we learn that limitation is not essentially connoted 
by it. The divine Being is sometimes said to be im- 
personal, in order to prevent the grandest of our con- 
ceptions from becoming impounded in a term that 
belongs to our finite life. But when the word Person 
is rightly defined we see that the epithet impersonal 
denies its essential infinity, remands in-being back into 
the category of force, and strips it of intelligence and 
will. The epithet may be used by people who intend 
to preserve these attributes, and are far from conceiving 
that God is a mode of force, or a soul of the worlcj ; 



A DIVINE PERSON. 



I 4 I 



both pantheism and anthropomorphism are out of 
favor with them, and impersonal seems to assert neither. 
In preserving the idea of infinity it releases God from 
limitations. But it imposes the fatal limitation of 
emptying all consciousness out of this infinity. It 
secures vastness at the expense of qualities that make 
the vastness worth having, and available for creative 
objects. Common sense pays a tribute to the value of 
the word person when it instinctively judges that the 
epithet impersonal takes an object out of the domain 
of volition. So it is no matter what is sometimes 
implied by people who use it : they cannot combine 
their implication with the organic sense of the epithet, 
for it will not bear the weight of any quality that be- 
longs to Person. 

We attribute Personality to the divine Being because 
we cannot otherwise refer to any source the phenomena 
that show Will and Intellect. Person is no more limit- 
ing than Being: but it is deeper by the whole con- 
tents of the idea of consciousness. None of our 
abstract w r ords for existence, continuance, immanence, 
meet the exactions of this problem ; which is, that if 
we reach consciousness we must have started from 
something conscious, if we rise to volition it must be 
from the pressure of some source of Will, if we per- 
ceive and exercise intelligence the supply must have 
been derived from Intellect. Find a word that shall be 
a symbol of the vital coexistence of qualities whence 
our personal experience is derived. 

Person ought to be the greatest, most venerable word : 
its equivalent in every language might supplant all the 
synonyms of God. For it says, I Am. 



I42 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Its Latin etymology betrays that it once denoted the 
opposite of this, for persona was the mask used by 
Greek and Roman actors, who voiced their feigned 
emotions through it. It must be brought out of this 
disguise, and accede to kingly senses ; for nothing is 
more real and positive, more legitimately heir to a 
throne, than the freedom of a man's Conscience, Intel- 
lect and Will. Nowadays the mask is the individual, 
through which the unfeigned person sounds. 
/ When we say, an infinite Person, we do not suggest 
infinity within limits, but volition and intelligence 
without them. Neighbors have a trick of calling each 
other persons, when they mean people or individuals 
with Christian names; they are, therefore, unprepared 
to discover that every one of these people touches 
infinity with his least individual and limited qualities, 
those immediately derived from the divine freedom, 
and can furnish this freedom with its name. We need 
not be prevented, then, by common usage, from lift- 
ing all limits away from the word Person, that it 
may be competent to represent consciousness raised to 
infinity. If in-being had not been always Personal, it 
never would have been in any thing : or rather, noth- 
ing would have been. Each man's creative instinct is 
the continuous explanation of the origins of things. 

The theologians dread the epithet impersonal be- 
cause they are interested to sustain the old theories of 
special providences and interventions, and need an 
individual who can step spryly out and into history, 
and be on time to a second to modify the natural order 
with whimsical fertility of afterthoughts and supple- 
ments. This is the Napoleon-Paul-Pry of the super- 



A DIVINE PERSON. 1 43 

naturalists. Such a God is not a Person, but a creature 
as large as the scheme of supernatural dogmatics : 
certainly no more extensive than the earth and its 
chronology, and his chief use is to sustain the credit of 
miraculous narratives, and to prevent chimpanzees 
from aspiring to be men. Theology is right in saying 
that if God be called impersonal he is emptied of vi- 
tality and put into a row of forces. But when we call IS 
him a Person we do not share the anxiety of the 
theologian to have a definite Life for the sake of the 
plan of redemption. Miracles and irruptions have now 
been superfluous for a long time, as long as an infinite 
Person has existed. During that time he has imparted 
his original Unity to the finite order, and saved us the 
trouble and mortification of trying to eke out its uni- 
formity. 

In Goethe's poem, the gentle Margaret would fain 
commit Faust to a statement of belief in a God ; but 
the poet's dread of limitations replies, that name is 
but sound and smoke o'er-misting heaven's glow. But 
when our highest integrity of life utters the name of its 
kinship with the infinite, every verbal dexterity falls 
off like manners of the individual in moments of pro- 
found sincerity, and the essence of the reality lets itself 
be touched. 

This is not naming, but rather indicating by a sym- 
bol, the direction where in-being may be found. The 
old guide-board that insists only upon the name of the 
next town will set the traveller around the world. We 
are content with knowing what tendency opens at last 
into the space where the original of our own conscious- 
ness awaits us. 



144 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

When two friends in old Greece parted, for journey- 
ing or war, a ring was severed, and each took half of 
it away with him. At their next meeting the first act, 
before a word would be spoken, was to fit the two 
halves together, and restore the symbol of their faith- 
fulness. Our word symbol comes from that word, 
sumballo, to put together ; and the Greek ring encir- 
cles the friendship that all signs have for truths. 

So mankind, parting long ago from the unnamed 
Deity, went into the first turmoil and uncertainty of 
living, and appeared overborne and indifferent to that 
half of a pledge which had been exchanged, its latent 
capacity to make a Person out of an individual. The 
journey ends, the return is made, the affinity pro- 
claimed with delight that absence sharpened, when 
the finite person, discovering himself, rounds himself 
against the infinite ; the perfect faith is a perfect fit, 
and no words that pass can lend it any quality. 

Did my life indeed ascend, 
Or some Life sink down to me? 
All I know, it was my friend : 
Name it, shape it? Let that be. 

When the individual sets whatever gift he has into 
personal freedom, recovering it from the whim and 
manner by which he is known among men, and is 
thought of by them as soon as his name is heard, he 
begins to build a consciousness of Deity, and to per- 
ceive that it is necessary to his life. No argument 
from nature, or from the marks of design in creation, 
can reach so high. Scientific method can demon- 
strate the unity and constant presence of divine intelli- 



A DIVINE PERSON. 145 

gence, but then has to wait for the individual to drop 
the key-stone of his personal freedom into that arch 
over which the finite and infinite pass to and fro. 

A good deal of our time is spent in the ordinary life 
which we inherit from physical conditions ; we cannot 
call it wasted time, for it piques us to recover our 
freedom, hampers and teases us as if on purpose to 
make us turn upon it and bid it respect the presence 
of a superior. Our most individual and least inde- 
pendent instincts grow huffy and important in the 
crowd that streams through the street, where each 
must jostle each for its right of way. I am John, — I 
am Peter: my time and interest are as valuable as 
yours ; let me pass. What a passage, as of some 
migrating nomadic horde of conceits and assump- 
tions, anxious to get into a fair pasture land to stake 
out their claim ! — past we go, dickering in town poli- 
tics, outwitting in caucuses, and subscribing money 
to buy up the floating vote ; scrutinizing each other's 
motives, garments, food, and drink, with ridiculous 
phrases of mutual depreciation that are blown away 
by the first real benefit ; jealously cheapening each 
other's goods, from a pound of spice to a lyric's flavor ; 
dreading too much success, hawking at too high and 
smooth a wing : a mob of voices getting hoarse over 
the right to a cesspool, or the direction of a drain, or 
a millennial text ; disputing in vestries about the num- 
bers in Daniel, the spokes in Ezekiel's wheels, mutual 
goring with the horns of any apocalyptic beast ; for- 
midable scrupulousness about the cut of each other's 
nails, and stealthy watching behind the door of decen- 
cies to catch some one betraying his weakness ; gath- 

7 



146 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

ering with cheap lanterns and brass to bid somebody's 
shiftiness show itself at the windows, and neatly recom- 
mend others to be shifty ; zeal to favor a few isolated 
traits that express the soul's least estimable gifts, and 
to get each other baptized or placarded with them, to 
pass as such instead of upon our real, though remoter, 
value; — these civic tricks and prejudices hurry indi- 
viduals through the world, as if a rescue by the Person 
were dreaded before the grave can be reached. 

People live so close together that they spindle and 
suffer in the general strength of their character. Some- 
times the injury makes them appear very ragged and 
unlovely ; yet all the while they may be holding aloft 
in clear air topmost features which solicit the sun and 
rain of heaven. One who rides from South- West Har- 
bor to Bar Harbor, in Mt. Desert, will see a grove in 
which the pines stand so close that all the branches 
have withered two-thirds of the way up the trunks, 
and are nothing but dead sticks, broken and dangling. 
But every tree bears close, each to each, its evergreen 
crown ; and they seem to make a floor for the day to 
walk upon. 

This pavement for the feet of heaven, more precious 
than the fancied one of New Jerusalem, stretches all 
around the world, above the thickets of our spiny ego- 
tism, w T here people run up into the only coherence upon 
which it is safe for Deity to tread. 

But our life has not been so dismantled by mortality 
that we cannot find traces that Deity has dwelt here, 
and plainly intends to again : perhaps it is in the next 
room, and our hand has been so often on the latch, but 
some stir below forbade us to enter. When a blazing 






A DIVINE PERSON. 1 47 

hour scorches these packthreads which we call Soci- 
ety, and our freed members recover natural move- 
ments, so that we turn towards each other, break the 
armed truce of our conceits, and embrace in a fashion 
oefore unheard of in our polished isolation, so closely 
that all hearts transmit the one blood of which we are 
made, and a flush of conviction outruns the planet's 
dawn, — then we overtake the indwelling Freedom, set 
free into it our personal power, and become a unity 
that shares organic laws. It is an experience of that 
wholeness of gift and feeling to which a divine pres- 
ence corresponds. 

When the powerful vibrations of music shake down 
our bars, and we are released to each other, or the 
upliftings of great speech take our feet from the 
ground, and we can no longer stand braced in resist- 
ance, but conspire into the wave of the orator's per- 
suasion, we are in the temper of Deity. It is never 
strange at such moments to find all the petty individu- 
als believing in God, unconsciously translating the oc- 
casion into the conviction that gathers and crushes all 
the clusters of all souls. God is the cup that catches 
that life's wine. We taste our own unadulterated 
flavor. 

A beautiful action wins a town's sympathy, and all 
the people exchange congratulations, having been so 
dazzled into forgetting surnames that they run to- 
gether. The moral order of eternity is let through 
into time, and never returns. Individuals hold the 
door, but the stronger people get it open, and a Person 
enters with the quality or eminence of the moment. 
Moral routine that represses every individual trait for 



I48 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

the sake of a household, a town, a commonwealth, is 
not stunted by the narrowness and severity of the act, 
but the universal advantage seems to repay it, by con- 
tributing extent to the nature of the actor, together 
with all the symmetry which his sacrifice won from 
the dull material. This obscure moral service creates 
for the individual a personality as large as the neigh- 
borhood of souls who have been improved by him. 
He cannot occupy so much space without including a 
sense of Deity. 

We are the persons who make this Person essential 
to us by living divinely. It is a deduction which de- 
velops when moral and spiritual gifts are set free : they 
pass into the certitude of a personal Will and Intelli- 
gence, because we have been living on that scale. 
The alternative is to sink back into the individual, and 
nurse its physical and animal predilections ; the ele- 
ments suffice for that, and the mind rises no higher 
than the notion of a Force. 

It is essential for Religion to have not only the ab- 
stract term, a First Cause, that will satisfy the mind 
when it attempts to account for itself, its structure, its 
mode of activity, its relation to the world, but a divine 
Person, to be the mind's qualifying ground and sub- 
stance, the persona] unity that endows all the units 
with a sense of being persons. He is not only the 
cause of our being here, but He keeps us here, and 
everywhere, the essence of our mental and moral 
unity continually guaranteeing our structure, _ and 
reaching through that to proof of Himself in our pri- 
vate freedom. So that it is the sacredness of the 
individual that endows in-being with Personality. It 



A DIVINE PERSON. 149 

must become one of the organic truths of American 
Religion. 

At this point, if at any in the argument, a claim 
might be admitted in favor of the instinct that the 
death of the body does not suspend or destroy personal 
continuance. It is objected, that no thought and feel- 
ing have ever yet been displayed independently of 
cerebral condition ; they must have brain, either to 
originate or to announce them. If brain be source or 
instrument of human consciousness, what preserves it 
when the brain is dead ? But there would have been 
no universe on such terms as that. What supplied 
infinite mind with its preliminary sine qua non of 
brain-matter? All worlds and objects are the lobes 
that waste and renew to express the moods of their 
Creator. Surely matter did not convene and organize 
for the production of a divine consciousness ; and to 
suppose the contemporaneous eternity of both does not 
impair the advantage which our own will ascribes to 
a Creator's will. 

To the scientific dictum, " No Mind without Brain," 
we are disposed to respond with the universe itself, 
that infinite equivalent to the phrase, " No Brain with- 
out Mind." And if the finite intellect shows marks of 
identity with the divine, by admitting and interpreting 
the laws of things and the unity of their development, 
it must be an identity that shares the creative advan- 
tage of finding its own brains. The universe teaches 
us that if one centre of force becomes dissipated, it is 
only a movement which creates another, and reestab- 
lishes its advantage. As fast as elementary forces are 
driven out of business, they set up afresh, and not one 



150 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

bankruptcy occurs. No man need trouble himself to 
rise from the dead to tell us on a small scale what the 
heavens declare with a mighty fugue and interplay of 
voice. Through all its transformations the world 
always weighs the same, and not a spark of vital 
agency is filched. " To say that life is the result of 
organization is to say that the builders of a house are 
its results." 

There is a great deal about an individual man that 
is not worth saving, and he will rejoice to be well rid 
of it at last, for it is a legacy from inferior structures, 
which he will eventually make superfluous. Heaven 
would be a menagerie if his tricks and gibberings 
got into it, a blustering amplification of traits which 
we already find intolerable. But they have not per- 
sonal vitality enough to set up housekeeping in that 
other place, dear to the mythological heart ; man- 
kind's meanness has not yet grown viciously virile 
enough to start a hell, even had God a hankering for 
one. 

We say of some men that they dare not or cannot call 
their souls their own. If it were true that they could 
not, owing to a structure that declined the task of be- 
coming a person, or to one that represented rudimen- 
tary and idiotic conditions, it would be also true that 
God could not call them his. When we observe that 
some elephants are more sagacious than some men, 
the suspicion intrudes that they are more valuable 
by so much ivory, and that even a divine mind could 
not utilize the men. All the phenomena of trivial and 
sordid living deceive our own conceit into presuming 
that God has a preference for us. But what man is 



A DIVINE PERSON. 151 

good enough for God ? Not one ; but all the men are, 
and their number at any time is the precise equivalent 
of his preference, for the lowest unit of this collective 
mankind must have a germ of personality that reports 
his own failure to himself, in a very groping and forest 
fashion, doubtless, yet not destitute of expectation. 
Despair itself is an investment of the person. 

The individual may become disintegrated without 
damage to the personality which resides in him to 
secure to the divine life some contact with him. What- 
ever apprehends or guesses that proximity must be at 
least as permanent as the matter of the world which 
shifts out and into physical conditions. 

But we can leave this problem to take care of itself, 
for nothing is so sure as death. Nothing is surer than 
that either something or nothing succeeds death. 
Everybody will therefore be conscious quite soon, or 
be unconscious, that personal continuance is a vital 
fact. It is a waste of time to be over-curious or 
anxious about a solution which a few years will secure 
for our experience. For it is no more essential to good 
living to acquire some proof of life in the future than 
it is to prove metaphysically that we are alive in the 
present. If proofs or probabilities of immortality ex- 
ist, they are so involved with truth of intellect and 
character, that they become identical with the fact that 
we are alive. What can enhance the reality of being 
actually alive? 

The bare belief in a continued existence ennobles 
man less than the personality that secures the fact. It 
is the amount of his moral and spiritual character, and 
it is already possessed by crowds of disinterested peo- 



152 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

pie who most vehemently deny that they have any 
corresponding instinct, and justly refuse to regulate 
their behaviors by the popular sentiments of reward 
and retribution that are connected with it. The most 
important thing is to become such persons of the uni- 
verse that it would stint the plan, and be wasteful, to 
extinguish us. 

Who does not become so ? What arbiter will draw 
the line? What odious aristocrat of virtue can em- 
bezzle the universal opportunity? 

" Oh, that a man might know 
The end of this day's business, ere it come! 
But it sufficeth that the day will end, 
And then the end is known." 

Let us serenely resume the argument for the neces- 
sity of a divine Person. 

Religion has always tried to endow the divine Per- 
sonality with a consciousness that reaches through 
Will and Intelligence into a mood that corresponds to 
human sympathy. It is worth while to see if this 
be a permanent instinct of human nature which the 
facts can justify and our own personal relations can 
explain. 

What becomes of the heart's old secret, that there is 
something like paternal regard for us, in this flood of 
common-sense that is beginning to cover all intelligent 
countries, to deposit facts and fruitful germs of truth 
about the divine order? Does the flood run down into 
the heart and drown out its secret, or is that left to brood 
there in the darkness, still alive, but languishing and 
growing bloodless every day for want of light and air? 
In former times there was hardly a circumstance that 



A DIVINE PERSON. 1 53 

did not help to feign a personal sympathy of God for 
man. Some divine agency had the contract to furnish 
corn and wine, to keep the pestilence subdued, to blunt 
the arrows of the elements, to provide antidotes to all 
poisonous things. Men trusted to a fatherly interfer- 
ence. If, notwithstanding this, they continued to suffer, 
the fact did not disturb their faith, because it was im- 
mediately interpreted to be a sign of the aversion and 
anger of the ruling power ; and they cast about to dis- 
cover what could have been the cause of the aversion, 
to remove it, if possible, and restore the ordinary com- 
fort and immunity. Worship began in this effort to 
propitiate the invisible, and to make atonement for 
real or fancied sins. For men have always cherished 
a fond notion that heaven takes regular and unremit- 
ting care of them ; the more ignorant they are, the 
more uncompromisingly is this interest attributed to a 
God. Children confide, and give themselves right up 
to the parent ; sensible of their own inadequateness to 
meet the wants of their organization, they make over 
the whole business to superior intelligence, with a 
sweetness and loyalty that always endow that intelli- 
gence with love, even where that attribute is very 
scanty or does not exist at all. 

Now the case is altering every day. Knowledge of 
invariable causes and effects has gone on, dislodging 
a divine person from one fact after another, driving it 
to the rear, disenchanting everything, and substituting 
consistent operation in the place of personal care. This 
has made the art of living vastly more easy, but it has 
made the problem of the Infinite Father more difficult 
to solve. For with all our increase of comfort, superi- 

7* 



154 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

ority to physical influences, ability to detect and baffle 
whatsoever is injurious to us, it is just as pathetic as 
ever to be alive ; we are just as likely to become actors 
in some tragedy that tells how a body or a soul may be 
discomfited, with no help for it, so far as we can see, 
from any paternal interference, as the old Hebrew was 
who thought his fathers had eaten sour grapes, or the 
old Greek who believed the same doctrine and called 
it Fate. We know enough about natural and moral 
causes to perceive, very often when it is too late, that 
our help would have been in avoiding something, or 
accepting something. " If we had only known at the 
time," we say. But how futile and irrational that is, 
with all its show of reason. It is " a ship's stern-light 
that illuminates nothing but the wake." 

If the Algerines had only known, a few years ago, 
that certain districts would be famine-stricken, they 
might have decamped : but staying on where they were, 
and expecting the annual average of rain, it happened 
that mothers became cannibals, and served up their 
children as the old Jewish mothers did during the siege 
of Titus. Providence must seem to a great many mis- 
erable persons like a state of siege : they have eaten 
every thing from meat to vermin and old leather, 
gnawed themselves barefoot and swallowed the saddles 
upon which they rode : yet the enemy still holds the 
lines of hunger. The miserable people totter to their 
battlements of belief, and scan the horizon for succor : 
sometimes they see a cloud of dust no bigger than a 
man's hand, and sometimes the landscape has the cruel 
smile of emptiness. Which is the Heavenly Father, the 
advancing cloud that does not always succeed in sweep- 



A DIVINE PERSON. 1 55 

ing off the enemy, or the barren outlook that does not 
even show a pretence of relief ? 

In reducing life to rule we have ruled out the per- 
sonal sympathy of the Lord of Life. How many ages 
went down on their knees before the cause of thunder, 
to make interest in behalf of their effects and dwell- 
ings : but it blasted on every hand according to a will 
of its own, and rolled deafening against all human 
expostulations. Now comes along Poor Richard, the 
apostle of Common Sense, puts his knuckle to a key 
that dangles at the wire-end of a kite, and down comes 
the mystery, hauTed to earth by a plaything. Of what 
use are prayers? God says virtually, " A rod to con- 
duct is more to the point — prayers at any rate are out 
of fashion." But the rod will also play its tricks, so 
that half mankind is undecided whether it invites or 
disarms the fluid. When a rusty nail or an imperfect 
connection is discovered, the survivors of a house that 
has been struck exclaim, " Oh, if we had only known 
it in time ! " How inexorable, then, is the Infinite Care. 
The weather that helps the crops to grow, and fills the 
woods and fields with gladness for all flower-hunters 
and those who linger hand in hand with friendship, 
has rotted away the rod at its connection, and the bolt 
leaps into a cradle. What have we gained with all 
our knowledge ? It has made our life in some respects 
more tragic than ever, for it has imported new elements 
into the pursuit of comfort and intelligence. Steam 
carries a hundred midnight sleepers, women and chil- 
dren, to a spot where a snake-head waits for them, and 
over they go, with but a shriek between sleep and 
death : then fire licks and swallows them. Is it not as 



156 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

tragic as a day before the walls of Troy? Less noble, 
because not caused by the daring to death of men who 
are wide awake and measuring their dangers with 
every glance : but far more piteous, far more accusing 
to our faith in the divine order. We can stand a trag- 
edy that steps forth in garments rolled in the blood of 
our own self-surrender. When a thousand negroes are 
willing to follow Shaw up the glacis of Fort Wagner, 
to dig with bayonets their own glorious grave together 
in the heat of that fraternal patriotism, we deliberately 
prefer the absence of the divine interference ; or we 
hail the tragedy itself as the divine presence emphasiz- 
ing itself and announcing its regard for the country's 
future. But at any rate the thousand graves grow 
green with our heart's spring-feeling, and not a house 
in the republic now regrets the blood it furnished. 
But when somebody invents the compound called 
nitro-glycerine, and commercial greed ships it to a 
populous port neglecting the cautiousness that is pro- 
claimed and reiterated by all the freaks of the elements, 
we call the result a massacre ; the piteousness of it 
recoils upon Providence : we forget all the tender texts, 
and the next time we go to sea, or take passage by the 
rails, we consider that we have taken shares in a great 
consolidated lottery, quite aware that our number may 
draw a blank. 

This, however, we have settled : mankind has suf- 
fered enough to settle that there is an invariable effect 
to every invariable cause, and that it is better to ap- 
proximate as fast and far as possible to finding what it 
is. But this very tendency has an effect, too, upon 
the religious sensibility, to deaden its old-fashioned idea 



A DIVINE PERSON. 1 57 

that there is something personal just the other side of 
all phenomena, something that manifests itself but is 
distinct from the manifesting, — that does things glad 
or grievous, but is not the same things itself, not swal- 
lowed up and lost in them, not laws and forces, but a 
lawgiver and a fountain of force : an Infinite Will that 
wills everything finite, but that does it all the time 
with some sort of personal apprehension and feeling, 
in a condition of being that corresponds in some way 
to our words love, pity, oversight, sympathy, consider- 
ateness. We are on the road to discover that God's 
most perfect considerateness was shown by him in 
the original devising of the laws of the world ; but the 
knowledge that is showing this drifts in the direction 
of emptying all personal feeling out of this original 
devising, until the considerateness appears as hard as 
a contract which a man takes to clothe and victual an 
army, to run a machine to the greatest profit at the 
least expense, to govern a school by system and not 
by personal character. The heart recoils from this to 
such an extent that a great many people, influenced by 
reaction against the cold, mechanical theory of the 
universe, refuse to know any thing more, do not care 
to follow the steps of intelligence, cry out for love and 
grasp at the straw of a church, at any thing that will 
float them to the old shore where they are sure a 
Heavenly Father is waiting to soothe them. When 
sorrow thunders at the cliffs and the tide of pathos 
steals in to cover all the meadows, they climb into the 
highlands of an Infinite bosom ; they are sure it will 
not reach them there : it laps their feet — it will not 
reach their waist : it is waist-deep — ■ but it will not 



158 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

overflow the lips. It does — it fights at the threshold 
of the lips with psalms of confidence, and strangles the 
last entreaty. What can a church do, or a creed that 
is stuffed with the tenderest words in the language? 
If there are moments when the Father is only inevi- 
tableness, what can religion do for us in this direction ? 
We attempt to free ourselves from this embarrass- 
ment by showing how the facts themselves are all 
religious. Knit at the four corners, the order of God 
descends, full of all manner of grand and creeping 
things, and we wake up to declare that nothing is 
common or unclean. We perceive how many evils 
are only states of imperfect development that make the 
perfect plan more clear : they are gospels that proclaim 
the purpose. And all the sciences come to us loaded 
with specimens of every sort that fit into a plan ; the 
gaps fill up so fast and the,, symmetry grows so evident 
that we do not mind the other gaps-; the soul rises into 
a feeling of confidence, stretches forth its exploring 
hand into the darkness and feels a warm hand every- 
where. The more it knows the more it confides. 
This is the very essence of Religion. That word must 
not be used to represent nothing but our longing to 
be pitied and comforted. It expresses the consolation 
that confidence imparts. Is there any other kind? 
You feel as a child does whose parents have called in 
the old physician, whose lost cases have never shaken 
the confidence that people pay to a perfect intention 
and to the highest reach of skill. The suffering child 
begins to rally in the happiness of that abject confi- 
dence born of the parents' deliberate experience. So 
the progress of knowledge recruits Religion. And 



A DIVINE PERSON. 159 

from this to a faith in an infinite source of friendship 
there is but a step. 

The step into that faith is made by human nature 
when it perceives that God befriends it through its 
friends, of its own flesh and blood. If all other 
proofs should fail to restore Personality to the Infinite 
Intelligence, this private test of friendship does it : for 
we say, If there is something above and distinct from 
myself that comes blessing .me in the shape of my 
friendship, it must be an Infinite Friendliness. No 
invariable natural processes are capable of that : they 
are impersonal, they have neither praise nor blame, 
sympathy nor aversion ; the relation between a man 
and the order of nature is the same as that between 
heat and cookery, an engine and the power that drives 
it. It would be just as impossible for caloric to indulge 
fraternal warmth as for the inevitable and consistent 
force of the world to have a partiality for its victims. 
Where, then, do you get your human friend from : 
must he not be derived from some primitive element 
of friendliness, or is this most precious of all motives 
self-generated? Is it merely the fondling among a 
herd of brains that prowl and browse in the. jungles 
of life, or has atomic affinity mustered to our blood 
to light these fire-signals upon mutual cheeks, and are 
these graspings of hands the ultimate effect of cohe- 
sion, this attractiveness nothing but a surplus of the 
magnet's spell? We are bold enough to suspect a 
divine breath in the sweet clover and new hay ; we 
delight to pretend that the trees stand straight in a 
life beneath, and the wild animals fill the forests with 
suggested instincts and not their own. Let us be as 



l6o AMERICAN RELIGION. 

generous to our best emotions. Whenever the notion 
of fatalism breaks out of the routine of nature, and 
gets into the mind to set up there the image of an 
indifferent and pantheistic God, the next friend who 
does us a favor out of pure love, who opens a vein 
and bids us hold a heart that he may drain away into 
it, fills the heavens and earth with himself, and invents 
friendship for God. 

The moral actions that are inspired by love are the 
correctives of the materialism which is undoubtedly 
nourished by our knowledge of so many laws and 
facts. When we put God into every thing, his person- 
ality becomes entangled : or when we put every thing 
into God, it is a pure mental gesture that embarrasses 
his distinctness from the effects that he produces. 
Things are infinite, and yet we must contrive some 
way of having God infinitely different from his things. 
We might swathe him with his universe till he became 
a mummy. We might crush out his personality with 
the weight of his ornaments. Our conscience has 
freedom enough of its own to be convinced that God 
must be free also : and that idea includes his personal 
distinctness from every thing that he felt free to make. 
Our being is in Him: his being is in us — yet he is 
One and we are others. It seems to me that Love is a 
good solver of this problem, if we fail to find law for 
it Love sometimes threatens to make us more hope- 
lessly pantheistic than ever, as we feel that love makes 
us one with each other and one with God. All things 
seem swallowed up in unity : landmarks are obliter- 
ated ; all the fences are taken down, and rights of 
property cannot be distinguished. At that very mo- 



A DIVINE PERSON. l6l 

ment God's Person becomes more distinct than ever : 
he is the source from which this unity flows and to 
which it loves to return. 

Whose idea was it that we should have friends and 
lovers, believers in ourselves, protectors of the heart 
against the ills of cause and effect, our champions for 
better and worse, who stand up for us when God's 
consistency appears to be trying to put us down, and so 
inspire us with the sense of a higher consistency that 
we cannot detect anywhere in nature, whose purpose 
is to use us up in a perfectly legal but sometimes very 
objectionable fashion ? Where does the charity come 
from that believeth, hopeth, and endureth all things? 
" Do you say that God has abandoned my husband to 
his habits?" said a wife to a professional comforter, — 
" then it is high time that I should stand up for him 
and see bim through. I will be God for him, if God 
is of your mind." What a taste of a divine Person 
who is distinct from the laws of habit ! One might 
say that God already had advantages enough in the 
operations of his natural laws : how various and su- 
preme they are, and how the good counterbalances 
the evil ! — but in the love of such a lover as that, God 
first becomes richer than his universe, and steps out 
of its complications into the reserve of Person. In 
that reserve there is our supplement of love. 

Will you not have a God at least as big as a man or 
woman who loves you? Not as fine as your own 
finest conception of pity, sympathy, championship, 
relationship ? The pantheist has inverted the telescope 
with which he scours the heavens, and God comes out 
at the little end : he becomes a vanishing God, a pigmy 



IG2 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

in the diminishing perspective. Here is a brave, am- 
ple, determined, whole-souled friend standing at your 
elbow on his two substantial feet, a man or a woman 
who is all aflame for you with human nature, expressly 
commissioned to atone for every disaster, and to make 
you forget both man and Providence when they are 
churlish. And here, through the telescope, is a dot 
of a source of friendship, with no personal friendliness 
in it ! 

Perhaps we object that we can have an actual expe- 
rience of our friend, but we have no similar experience 
of the proximity of any divine source of friendship, 
and cannot pretend to have, however much we try to 
lift ourselves into the mystical rapture of such a union. 
That is because we have been taught unnatural ways 
of approaching God, by prayers and phrases : a form 
of worship, we are told, is the only ladder that will 
take us up through the scuttle into the illimitable air. 
But we find God by staying in the house that all our 
natural gifts have built around us. He comes and 
dwells with us in them. And if we would turn to 
speak to him it must be through the channels of his 
presence. When all our gifts conspire with God we 
share an ecstasy of creativeness, compared with which 
the raptures of the lean and yellow mystics are the 
maunderings of typhus-fever. Try God by way of 
your whole nature, and see if this age of intelligence 
be not still capable of detecting something divine. 
Do at least as much as you do towards your friend : 
try a little mutuality. For no man can have a 
friend or lover gratis : he continues for us on the 
strength of our own seeking, our own striving, our 



A DIVINE PERSON. 1 63 

faithfulness and sense of needing him. When we 
pay out something towards the invisible Friendship, 
through the fragrance of blossoming gifts, and not with 
the counterfeits of liturgies and violent assertions of 
homage, sneaking and importunate teasing for special 
providences, we shall find that the principle of mutu- 
ality is most perfect, most captivating and soul-suffic- 
ing in the direction of the primitive source of all our 
human mutualities. Friendship is spontaneous, mag- 
netic, subject to the laws of affinity, no doubt : but in 
all affinities there are two parties. Is God the only 
party in the universe who is left out of this chance for 
an affinity? We shall have an answer to that ques- 
tion when we have recovered from our theological 
dyspepsia, and cease to make our bad breath an 
offence in his nostrils. Let the whole nature turn 
consciously towards Him, so that the sincerity of all 
thoughts, passions, and emotions shall remind his 
infinite friendship of itself, and earth be heaven's 
comrade. 

Does any suggestion come out of the infinite like 
this? "You have got to like me whether you wish 
to or not, for in me you live and move and have 
your being. I am, if the personal pronoun may be 
used, your great, immanent, pantheistic, No-otherness. 
Come — or if coming be too strong a word in a case 
where there is no Person to come to, stay, as we are, 
together. I am like the juggler's bottle : draw what 
tap you please. Call for pity, love, comfort, indigna- 
tion : it is all the same to my indefinite sameness. In- 
deed, you must take something." 

The cure for this is in the broad and positive living 



164 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

that is carried on by human nature. The old prescrip- 
tion was to seek God by isolated piety ; men were 
told to lift their souls into personal communion by 
some single gift of prayer, of meditation, of remote 
abstraction. You might as well prescribe to a man 
who is standing in a basket to lift himself by taking 
hold of the handles. If the whole soul does not go 
forth to its Creator, all the single gifts will lag behind, 
and the fancy will be deceived by much straining and 
mimicry of aspiration. When a man healthily fulfils 
the uses to which God would put him he finds the 
object of his worship, for God is coextensive with his 
nature. The dancing Dervish spins around himself 
to the point of vertigo, then sinks exhausted in a kind 
of swoon which passes for assimilation with the 
Deity. He comes out of it as light-headed as he went 
in ; and this is the usual result of isolated gestures 
which pretend to unite the finite with the infinite. 
Has not God already suggested the terms on which 
he will yield himself? They are the nature in men 
and women perfectly developed and harmonized by 
health. If the whole of a man expresses God, then 
nothing short of the whole can find Him. 

Wherever a few neighbors live together within the 
sound of each other's troubles, they do not need to 
overhear each other when invoking the infinite com- 
passion. The invocation is all wasted breath, for the 
compassion is already with them in the opportunities 
of human friendship. And there is no man so de- 
spised, whether justly or not, who is without a friend 
who gives him a lift, picks him from the gutter, helps 
him to regain his feet from some staggering disap- 



A DIVINE PERSON. 1 65 

pointment. Some counsel rallies to some exigency, 
some partisan to some defence. All the peopled 
places of the 'earth are provided with this friendly 
cooperation, which is the most effective kind of divine 
intervention, and an answer that never failed to the 
outbursts of human anguish. God hears by all the 
ears he has provided. And if a man's complaint, in 
desert places, upon islands in desolate seas, or on the 
famine-stricken raft, does not reach an ear it does not 
reach the divine interference. Where there is no 
friend the agony exhales in prayers : the sea swallows 
it, the whirling sand-columns of the desert overtake 
it, and leave bleaching bones to mark the absence of 
God's opportunity. All shipwrecks and disasters that 
prove fatal, notwithstanding agonized entreaties flung . 
heavenward, because no human help is near, only 
prove the general intent of heaven to manifest its pity 
by some friend. A man's distress converts an indiffer- 
ent neighbor to a brother. Many a wilful soul that 
has gone far astray, and earned the detestation of 
society, becomes at length an embodied prayer, though 
only curses may pass the lips ; and some innocent 
heart acknowledges the eloquent appeal, and, drawing 
near to lift up the battered and distorted character, 
hears its first religious confession, as it is surprised 
into saying, " Oh, then I see God has still some pity 
for me ! " What promise of a Comforter is equal to 
the performance of human compassion ! 



VII. 

AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 

IF we reject the ordinary inferences which theology 
draws from the doctrine of a divine Person, all of 
which can be defined as assumptions that His mode 
of operation does not invariably follow the lines of His 
own laws, let us see if the country can make any use 
of the theory that reconciliation of man with God is 
the central act of Religion. It supposes that man has 
fallen away from a vital connection with the source 
of spiritual health, and that he becomes religious by 
reestablishing the relation, for damaging which he 
alone is responsible. To give such a theory any repu- 
tation, it is necessary to impute feelings to God that 
are purely human, and belong to the kitchen furniture 
of the individual, — that he is exorable, or willing to 
modify his intentions at human entreaty ; that he is 
placable, also that he is implacable ; that he with- 
draws from people who offend or thwart him, and 
returns when the offender relents and abandons his 
posture ; behaving generally like a human father of not 
the most magnanimous and elevated type. 

This gross anthropomorphism has been the result 
of the mind's taking refuge in texts, whenever it is per- 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 67 

plexed at the phenomena of physical and moral evil, 
instead of in the information that science furnishes of 
an immutable and consistent government of the world. 
In this respect, the monotheism of the Old Testament is 
far from being homogeneous. Sometimes the Lord has 
the passions and caprices of a gigantic man : he repents 
having made the other men ; he crushes enemies, and 
exacts the pound of flesh ; he is jealous ; he counts the 
incense, and marks if its perfume be rare ; he is open 
to various inducements to condone offences. Some- 
times the later page soars above this fetichistic smoke 
of sacrificial fat, into the serene space where Cleanthes 
sung his hymn to the Supreme. But the Scriptures 
never forget to assume that man must be reconciled to 
God, while God is reconciled to man by some vicari- 
ous project that preserves the self-respect of justice. 

But phrases which are suggested by ancient texts 
only perpetuate ancient misunderstandings. They are 
no better than the abstract terms of philosophers who 
try to account for things before science has equipped 
their minds. A new country must let these drain 
away, together with oligarchic dogmas, through the 
great cloaca of the past. 

We must find a practical sense in which Religion is 
the act or state of man's reconciliation with God, be- 
cause we are conscious that a variance is set on foot in 
the world itself, which is full of things that cry aloud 
to be reconciled. Left to themselves, they whimper 
not one word of justification. They appear so con- 
tradictory to human ideas of help and providence, that 
they would be considered impossible, if experience did 
not personally report them to us. What is their ori- 



1 68 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

gin, we ask in some dismay, and how can a perfect 
intelligence sustain them? When, for instance, we 
perceive the fact of the inequality of human conditions, 
and how irreconcilable it is with our fraternal ascrip- 
tion of impartiality to God, we say, Is the fault in our 
ascription ? 

In Mr. Thackeray's novel of " The Newcomes," 
there is a scene where the noble but unfortunate hero 
of his book sits in the pauper's gallery during divine 
service, having come at last to that complexion, not- 
withstanding a disinterested life ; and over his cower- 
ing, weather-beaten head rolls the grand assertion of 
the liturgy, " I have been young, and now am old, yet 
have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed 
begging bread." The anthem reverberates against its 
own refutation in the gallery, and can hardly retain 
countenance in men's minds for its generous assump- 
tion that things ought to be, at least, as it declares 
they are* 

Vulgar opulence fills the street from wall to wall of 
the houses, and begrudges all but the gutter to every- 
body whose sleeve is a little worn at the elbows. 
Long careers of vice, that prosper even in their epi- 
taphs, make cemeteries seem ridiculous, and death any 
thing but a leveller. Some one ventures to allude to a 
compensating hereafter, hinting that Dives will there 
change places with Lazarus, to find Cerberus too dis- 
dainful to lick his sores, and Lazarus not eager to over- 
heat himself with running to fetch him water. We 
should be surer of this future balancing of the books, 
if we could reason from traces of analogy in a number 
of cases of such exemplary compensation in the present 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 69 

life ; but if we could, our higher motives would refuse 
to accept a justification that merely turned upon shift- 
ing the saddle from the beast to the rider. Misery 
cannot long exult in opportunities to make other peo- 
ple miserable. The theologians, who derive their 
whole scheme of heaven from the petty spite that 
sometimes crows and capers here, derive it from a 
feeling that is more irreconcilable with God than all 
the misery and all the vice ; and it is one of which 
mankind is heartily ashamed, though we have heard 
of one venerable dame of orthodoxy who said, " Some 
folks think that a good many people will be saved, but 
we hope for better things." If all hunchbacks could 
plant their humps between the shoulders of all their 
deriders, the world would have one moment of a re- 
sounding Ha-ha ! to see accounts so happily squared. 
But the next moment would express the pity of a God, 
and we should hear every man anxiously reclaiming 
his hump, as an evil inferior to the mortification of 
seeing it upon another. Flourishing vulgarity is more 
unconscious than wicked ; a destitute refinement is a 
great deal more capable of bearing malice. 

But what is vice itself but another mark of inequal- 
ity of human conditions? One man is born of un- 
healthy parents, littered in some inclement corner, and 
left to forage in the streets. His hunger is appeased 
by a kind of diet that propagates the diseases of his 
blood. When he is exasperated into committing of- 
fences against society, we lock him up ; but this is not 
a religious act that reconciles him with the moral 
order. It only protects the neighborhood while he 
nurses his destructive skill, and waits to be restored to 



170 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

the opportunities of using it. There are born burglars 
who cherish a professional pride, and long to earn the 
approbation of distinguished cracksmen ; they discuss 
in prison their arts, as Cicero in his Tusculan villa 
broached questions of divination with his stoic friends. 
The congenital peculiarity becomes a fate to arrange 
the whole checkered career of detection and impunity. 
Who is responsible for this ? 

If a man is profligate enough to take advantage of 
the lightheadedness which sometimes afflicts a starv- 
ing and forsaken woman, both his profligacy and her 
misfortune need to be reconciled with the purity of 
God. The Social Evil is a double-headed clamor 
against heaven. And we put another tongue into its 
accusation, when we make an outcast of the woman, 
and a tolerated nuisance of the man. 

Not vice alone, but ignorance that is defenceless, 
upbraids the divine impartiality. Early in the six- 
teenth century the continent of Africa was found to be 
a prolific hot-bed of beings who wore the full shape 
of manhood without its full intelligence ; they instantly 
piqued the necessities of commerce and labor, which 
have ever since spun this helplessness into ties for 
holding kingdoms together. The slaver dropped his 
anchor off the fringe of that ignorance, and took it on 
board as freight : the black heart hunted the black 
skin, and infected a whole continent with delayed jus- 
tice. No other tribes of men could have remained 
abject long enough to force such retributions from 
heaven. Did God construct this peculiar type of igno- 
rance in order to extort at last peculiar vengeance ; to 
tempt sagacious cupidity, so that three centuries of 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 171 

oppression might be signalized by the miseries of the 
weak and the degradations of the strong? When this 
asks to be reconciled with our feeling of the divine 
paternity, religion is frustrated by its own texts. 
" Like as a father pitieth his children" sounds ironi- 
cally, and " God hath made of one blood all men" 
becomes degraded into a fact of physiology. " Come 
unto me all ye that labor and are heavy-laden," on the 
lips of priests in St. Domingo, and of bishops in Vir- 
ginia, has had a queer touch of the auction-block in it, 
as of a highest bidder collecting together the women 
and children who have been knocked down to him. 
Religion must perceive that its finest texts have only 
furnished sedatives to mankind, which has come out 
of each narcotic drowse to find its trouble aggravated. 

Not to multiply the instances which make history 
appear to be only a late afterthought and rectification 
of divine justice, in its struggle to repair deficiencies 
in the practical effect of nature and circumstance, it 
is safe to say that the whole structure of society is an 
indictment which religion must quash, or be put into 
the bar to be judged by a moral sense that is supe- 
rior to the evils which it has accused. 

Religion has undertaken to reply by methods that 
have only given emphasis to ignorance. Its explana- 
tions have been additional evils. Upon a man whose 
blood is poisoned it has only conferred the sad consist- 
ency of showing that he could not help his vice, or 
could not help incurring it. For if men have spoiled 
themselves by their own fault, theology cannot make 
it clear that they could have helped it, because a part 
of the fault may be justly referred to the constitution 



172 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

which gave men a fatal tendency towards spoiling 
themselves. It is useless to struggle, by forms of 
speech and elaborate systems of doctrine, against that 
supposed error in the divine plan, by which men, 
through ignorance and passion, have made free to 
degrade themselves, and by doing this to force God to 
resort to schemes of reconstruction and atonement. 

What reply can theology make to the natural pro- 
test of mankind against the evils which have infested 
it since men drew breath ? No legends of the fall of 
man by an act of his free will can satisfy man's in- 
stinct that reconciliation with God means something 
different from undoing God's own work and substitut- 
I ing for it a scheme of salvation. God undertakes a 
piece of work that does not need undoing. He does 
not spin a web by day, which, like Penelope, he must 
unravel by night, to postpone the loss of his sovereignty. 
If we try to think well of God by thinking ill of the 
men he has made, we are irreligious. What is there 
in the whole expanse of the universe that can com- 
pare with the different tribes and people he has made, 
who, naturally enough, prefer light to darkness, tend 
to rejoice in the warmth of the sun and the inbreath- 
ing of oxygen that repairs their blood as fast as it 
deteriorates? This is a symbol of the atmosphere 
their souls inhale. If it is still worth while to keep 
the word Religion in the human family, to represent 
a tendency that was strong enough to ennoble the past 
in spite of its unnatural doctrines, and is the hope of 
a wiser future, we must show that there is a better 
way of binding men to God than by assuming that 
they are not fit for it by nature. We tie them neck 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. I 73 

and heels with the strands of that doctrinal fiction, and 
then fasten them into a pew to listen to a service that 
is only an apology for God's defects. 

The theology that posits enmity between man and 
God, no matter by whose fault, must assume that God 
cannot be content until his sovereignty is acknowl- 
edged. He has been offended, he demands reparation ; 
his sense of justice cannot tolerate the wrongs he has 
suffered at the hands of men. But as mankind itself 
is not large enough to satisfy the claim of an infinite 
justice, infinity itself must be the liquidation of its 
own debt. In other words, reduced to plain absurdity, 
God himself atones for the injuries which he has 
received. He does not remit or condone them, still 
less pass them over, but he is entangled in the awk- 
wardness of paying a just bill which he knew could 
not be paid when he brought it in : in fact, only 
brought it in for the superfluous object of paying it 
himself. William Blake said of the Atonement: " It 
is a horrible doctrine : if another man pay your debt, 
I do not forgive it." 

Theology of the atoning kind is derived from a mis- 
interpretation of the sacrificial history of the race. 
As a victim has always bled to expiate or to propitiate, 
the theologian concludes that a yearning forecast of 
mankind quenches its thirst at length in the blood 
of a Redeemer, to whose veins the whole logic of crea- 
tion has been gathering, from its barest and most 
distant members, till a divine heart lends it a pulse 
of explanation and atonement. Then every offering 
and victim that has testified to a human desire for 
reconciliation becomes justified, but at the same time 



1 74 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

superseded, by the Victor- Victim, and the course of 
sacrifice is complete. In this way, a history, that is 
really a succession of human escapes from the fetich- 
istic idea that substitutes of all sorts can pay man's 
debts and keep the invisible appeased, is interpreted 
to be a succession of human anticipations of a genu- 
ine sacrifice that grow more and more emphatic, till 
the time is ripe and the victim full grown. Just when 
the "Lamb of God" became a harmless figure of 
speech, in texts whose mediatorial rhetoric had no 
idea of spilling blood, it was exaggerated into an 
infinite fact and slaughtered, so far as phrases and 
councils could do it, for a mankind that had outgrown 
the need of it. And nothing is left of the ancient sac- 
rificial error but the vague subjective sentiment which 
is created by these phrases. Man is discovering his 
own structural, personal, and immediate connection 
with the infinite, and learns fast that the laws of his 
own nature must take away his sins. If they do not, 
then nothing else, though slain from the foundations 
of the world, can accomplish it. 

The notion that a primitive custom must indicate a 
natural necessity, because it has been gradually devel- 
oped and refined, might as well legitimate other obso- 
lete manners of the human race. All old customs are 
not the tide-guages of real latent tendencies that creep 
towards their height ; many of them are rather the 
obstructions of an early coast-line, which the tide 
would fain desert and overflow, as it extricates itself 
and mounts to clearness. Thus the tendency to ac- 
count for the world, to rationalize its phenomena, and 
to reach a deduction of the relation between the creat- 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 75 

ure and creator, carried barbarism on its bosom for 
ages, and has not even now thrown off the perilous 
stuff. We value the customs as marks of a mental 
struggle, not as signs of intimate spiritual correlation. 
As soon might we advocate some gymnastic method 
of stealing our wives, by making matrimonial raids 
on the next town and taking them from unwary rela- 
tives, because savages procured women by dragging 
them off by the hair, amid the resistance of an out- 
raged clan. It might be confirming to discover highly 
evangelical traces of this primitive revelation among 
people who still provoke a pitched battle to get women 
away from their tribe or family. We might pursue the 
gradual amelioration of this practice, through scenes 
of mock combat, running-matches, bloodless surprises, 
feigned reluctance of the women, symbolic substitutes, 
till nothing is left of the aboriginal skirmish but an 
old shoe to be tossed after the departing bride. " That, 
indeed, is going too far, ,, orthodoxy might say : " that 
is the way liberalism has treated the Atonement by 
running the serviceable truth down at the heel, and 
then expending with immense demonstration of genu- 
ine sacrifice what is not worth being kept. But see, 
in this matter of marriage, how development itself 
justifies some recourse to violence. We have reached 
an Altar-form of sacrifice, let us have the halter style 
of wooing. By returning to the divine theory of rav- 
ishment, let us suppress altogether this increasing 
infidelity of Christless people, who would win the 
love of a whole family in order to win their too will- 
ing wives." 

The old tendency to forcible marriage involves a 



I*]6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

necessity of human nature as much as the old dogmatic 
forms of sacrifice. 

In the famous letter which Pliny wrote to Trajan, 
that describes his dealings with the Christians in By- 
thynia, he mentions that the superstition is widely 
spread, but that he can report some improvement, 
and says, u Victims are again on sale, purchasers hav- 
ing been very difficult to find." No doubt the early 
Christians found it more economical, as well as Scrip- 
tural, to substitute Christ for the sacrifices of the 
temple-services. For though the idea of an Atone- 
ment did not assume a dogmatic form till long after, 
it was gathered from the apostolic epistles, and taken 
for granted by the popular Christian feeling. So the 
old pagan notion survived in this form, to be trans- 
ferred to modern Europe. Purchasers have never 
been difficult to find ; all people who relish the idea 
of offering up somebody, other than themselves, to 
satisfy the infinite justice, will subscribe to the ecclesi 
astical system that preserves this reminiscence of 
heathendom. 

We must not, however, forget to notice that modern 
atoning schemes resort to justifying themselves to 
human nature, by appearing to reintroduce the divine 
Love into a system impaired by sin, like air into an 
ill-ventilated house. But the Love already pervades 
all professions, arts, and labors, and is the ideal 
against which the imperfections declare themselves 
and appeal for remedy. The densest body has pores 
which invite its ingress. If a man calls at my dooi 
with a patent portable case of atmosphere, I have 
only to open the window to bid him pack, to dis- 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 77 

cover and inhale the blessing he pretended to 
bring. 

To be a finite being is no crime, and to be the 
Infinite is not to be a creditor. As man was not con- 
sulted, he does not find himself a party in a bargain, 
but a child in the household of Love. Reconciliation, 
therefore, is not the consequence of paying a debt, or 
procuring atonement for an injury, but an organic 
process of the human life. 

Man begins to be reconciled with God when he 
learns the laws of things and accommodates himself ;/■ 
to them. Take a few simple cases for illustration. 

A person finds it utterly irreconcilable with his idea 
of a God that he should have inherited some vicious 
propensity. Another person finds it equally irreconcil- 
able that his structure leaves him able to originate a 
vice, and transmit it to his children. But as soon as 
these people feel so, their reconciliation with God has 
begun : they have an ideal which makes them con- 
scious of the discrepancy, and sets them to work to 
reduce it, by using that law of their nature which ex- 
presses the full purpose of God. It is the same law 
of the divine nature that subsidizes universal evil to 
justify its mode of operation, in furtherance of a cre- 
ating plan. Whether these persons succeed or not in 
this redemption, does not affect the fact that they are 
religious only when they substitute this method of 
obedience to their own law for any verbal statements 
or beliefs in schemes. They bind themselves to God 
by a natural tie of likeness to Him ; remorse is the 
natural pain at the discovery that the tie is threatened 
or enfeebled, spiritual joy is the natural mood of a 

8* 



178 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

return to harmony. The tendency* feels contented 
when it is gratified. 

A person finds it irreconcilable with his instinct 
concerning God, that he should have been born in 
ignorance and wretchedness, a prey to poverty, the 
victim of cunning or tyranny. Perhaps he is so little 
able to help himself that his only spiritual life is resig- 
nation. He is doomed to that when he feels secretly 
entitled to the satisfaction of all his human wants. 
These compose his natural law. And they are claims 
of his vested in more fortunate individuals, who are 
thus instinctively brought to his side. Reconciliation 
with God begins through the religious action of these 
persons who perceive what is the natural law of every 
human being. The true mediatorial scheme is the 
interference of practical sympathy, which appears in 
charitable, social and political influence. Thus his 
own law is liberated, and he too can begin religion 
by applying this ready-made element of reconciliation 
to other souls. 

The laws of things are the material of the right 
thinking in which religion has its root. Right living 
is derived from them alone. A part of this right 
thinking consists of the active moral tendency that 
emphasizes the health, sanity, and righteousness that 
is in all things. What a reconciler of man with God 
is Social Science, and what an atoner for every orig- 
inal taint ! It directly attacks the evils which prevent 
mankind from becoming truly religious, and proclaims 
the right theology — that bad living of all kinds nour- 
ishes this hypochondria of a feud between earth and 
heaven. Beginning at the very root, it shows that 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. I 79 

imperfect ventilation is symbolical of all the rest of 
the irreligiousness that keeps mankind disconsolate 
by making so much corrupted blood. Whatever dis- 
turbs the proper aeration of the contents of the lungs 
puts men in training for any kind of craze. For 
poisoned blood infects the brain with poisoned thought 
and feeling. Bad air, bad food, bad drink, alters the 
blood-disks, and suborns for villainy the finest struct- 
ures. Therefore Social Science begins a true vicari- 
ous mission by the expressive and beautiful action of 
cutting windows in dead walls, to let the sky fall 
through into Stygian apartments ; of establishing 
draughts that carry off noxious vapors and admit the 
close pursuing air, well cooked by the sun's actinic ray. 
Then its ban is put upon bad meats and unwholesome 
tricks in the preparation of food. Thirty miles of tub- 
ing in the skin are cleared out, and the sewerage of the 
human system established, so that every internal organ 
sheds baseness by insensible transpiration. Light, air, 
and water, that undoctrinal Trinity, threefold Unity 
that makes and sustains the world, casts out from the 
brains of its children their legion of devils : the very 
swine flourish by cleanness enough to refuse to let 
them enter. There is nothing with a love of impurity 
so ingrained as to take them in. So that men and 
women are seen glorifying God by sitting clothed and 
in their right mind. What recorded triviality of mir- 
acle can match the vast power of this simple spell of 
natural religion ! 

Reconciliation is the assumption or recovery by all 
organs and tendencies of their proper action. What 
a religious ecstasy is health ! Its free step claims every 



l8o AMERICAN RELIGION. 

meadow that is glad with flowers ; its bubbling spirits 
fill the cup of wide horizons and drip down their 
brims ; its thankfulness is the prayer that takes pos- 
session of the sun by day, and the stars by night. 
Every dancing member of the body whirls off the 
soul to tread the measures of great feelings, and God 
hears people saying, u How precious also are thy 
thoughts, how great is the sum of them ; when I 
awake I am still with thee." Yes, — " when I 
awake," but not before : not while the brain is satu- 
rated with venous blood, till it falls into comatose 
doctrines and goes maundering with its attack of 
mediatorial piety and grace ; not while a stomach, de- 
praved by fried food, apothecary's drugs, and iron- 
clad pastry (that target impenetrable by digestion), 
supplies the constitution with its vale of tears, ruin of 
mankind, and better luck hereafter. When all my 
veins flow unobstructed, and lift to the level of my 
eyes the daily gladness that finds a gate at every pore ; 
when the roaming gifts come home from Nature to 
turn the brain into a hive of cells full of yellow sun- 
shine, the spoil of all the chalices of the earth beneath 
and the heavens above, — then I am the subject of a 
Revival of Religion : she wakes the brooding thought 
to observe that the whole man, from the crown of the 
head to the sole of the feet, and all the tender, bitter, 
glorious things that transpire within that compass, 
are reconciled to God. 

Let the ideal' impulse, which clothes itself in the 
forms of art, rejoice to have left behind whole galleries 
of pictures, which age is blackening for their libels 
upon the divine nature. Mankind will be fortunate 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. l8l 

if Calvinistic gloom, and the " agony of impotence " 
of the Catholic ascetic, have fallen out of the moral 
sense by the time those painted outrages have rotted 
from their frames. What can a robust country do 
with those hospital silhouettes of saints, save perhaps 
to preserve them for warnings in museums of morbid 
anatomy, as lusus naturce, whose malformation is a 
halo? 

The country itself is a Consolator, colored too heart- 
ily for the thin-blooded palette of Scheffer, whose 
central figure seems to say to the miserable groups: 
" I'm sorry for you, but you see how melancholy I 
look, and that must be your comfort." Liberty shores ^ 
up the bruised reed, binds up the broken hearts, and 
summons every oppressed spirit into the natural deliv- 
erance of health, usefulness, and glad cooperation. 
On the freshly-stretched canvas of American land- 
scapes plenty of Ecce Homos breathe and live, who 
hide their wounds lest they fill the eyes of beholders 
with a mediaeval pity, and blur the strong lines that 
the muscles wrested from daylight and expectation. 
The heads droop with the weight of smiles gathered 
from new-mown fields. 

And though D antes are scarce, there are plenty of 
Beatrices who draw manhood up to substantial para- 
dises without flattening their womanhood into the lack- 
lustre sanctity of the painter ; such a Beatrice as he 
has drawn would make us first ashamed of Dante, 
that such a sexless tenuity could hold his paradise sus- 
pended. The fine art of healthy living must furnish 
well-grown subjects to the Muses of America. 

A great deal of anxious thought is given to the diffi- 



1 82 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

cult problem of the Social Evil, which drains religion 
out of men and women by the way of their life-blood, 
and leaves them flaccid and corrupted. How can it be 
reconciled with that artless intention of Nature's pro- 
creative force, which, as it reaches personality in the 
reserve of woman, suggests the divine purity? The 
question is no sooner asked than Social Science, 
leaving to the police the pastime of arresting female 
street-haunters and letting their male danglers go free, 
undertakes the business of a real reconciliation, by ad- 
vocating conditions that will make woman the mistress 
of an honorable and unassailable position. When 
she gains that, by finding avenues of labor open to her 
that are now choked by men, so that she can show 
she is deserving of a man's wages for doing a man's 
-work, as she already does in many a school-house 
and counting-room, she will become the mistress 
of her person. Her natural law revolts at her own 
degradation, and agonizes to be reconciled with God. 
What can she do for herself? Stand out of the way, 
and let her see. Let every door aswing : she will ap- 
proach it, look in, and enter if she sees that the work 
inside corresponds to her temperament. And when 
she does things so well, that men will cease saying 
they are pretty well done for a woman, let her have 
every cent that her work legitimately brings. If 
woman undertakes to paint, to draw, to model, to write 
verses, let her not enter the market of complaisance 
with inferior articles and expect to draw pay on the 
strength of her sex. But when she equals man in what- 
ever trades are appropriate to her genius, — behind 
all counters, in all counting-rooms, at the desk of the 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 83 

calculator or the writer, in the school-room and pro- 
fessor's chair, — let her draw, cent for cent with man, 
the wages that reconcile them both with God. See 
these spruce men monopolizing industries that her 
nice tact and delicate taste could fill, at least, as well. 
Stand aside ; go into fields that are enriched by mus- 
cular and virile vigor ; vacate those places : the honor 
and self-respect of woman wait to fill them. Society 
has fallen sick with the struggles and agonies of the 
unemployed. Marriage itself is polluted by the exi- 
gency. Poverty must make a match, or make an 
assignation, or make some bargain scandalous to the 
man who drives it. More shillings conceded to the 
making of a shirt would double the religion of man- 
kind. 

Political science also undertakes the task of recon- 
ciliation when it recurs to the natural law of mankind, 
as the foundation for its organizing skill, to secure 
every man's title to life, liberty, and happiness. It is 
a favorite saying of some critics of our country, that 
they would vastly prefer to be ruled by one man than 
by a million ; and that a man preserves his self-respect 
better when he lets himself be used by one great in- 
tellect, than when he is tyrannized over by a vulgar, 
passionate and unreflective popular opinion. This is 
the sentiment that prolongs the vulgar vices of the 
people. Wherever this creed of an oligarchy flour- 
ishes, the common people do not rise out of their 
degradation ; they will be " mean whites," " poor 
trash," servile in peace, truculent in war. Put any 
weapon in their hand but intelligence, and they will 
parody the pride of their owners, and scrawl it in 



V 



1 84 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

blood. Their limited ideas are the reverse of the 
coin which is stamped with the limited sympathy of 
their rulers. Read one side, and you need not turn it 
to know what is written on the other. Mean, cramped, 
superstitious, lazy, stolid minds exist side by side with 
fine, fastidious, secluded, selfish intellects. Like 
master, like man ; in one the narrowness borrows the 
traits of culture, in the other it is stamped by the 
barbarism which this culture maintains for its sole 
neighborhood. There's a whole wood-full of spind- 
ling and awkward sticks to one big and shapely tree : 
they protect it from the weather by their extent of 
abortiveness. But a handsome wood for shade and 
timber is the one where all the trees range pretty 
evenly, and are banded together in mutual and per- 
manent conspiracy against the storm. 

But the doctrine that all men are equal may easily 
be misunderstood to mean that no men are superior, 
or that if they are it must be in consequence of some 
fraud upon the whole. The equal right to enjoy an 
opportunity is not derived from, or authorized by, an 
identity of mental and ethical proficiency, any more 
than the chance to be healthy results from a perfect 
sanitary condition of all. When such an error infects 
the minds of men who crave some share in the oppor- 
tunities of their fellows, it postpones their own cause 
by mixing with it crude and passionate schemes of 
social promotion, unscientific theories upon the rela- 
tion between capital and labor, and jealous dread of 
the successes of talent. The markets of the world are 
not controlled by equality, but by difference ; and in 
the whole range of differences a sense of justice is 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 85 

found in union with the mental superiority that is 
essential to provide for men their opportunities. They 
will inevitably enjoy more than their own attainment 
can represent, provided they do not make their lack 
of attainment a claim to something besides justice : to 
encroachment, for instance, "upon just superiority. 
Wherever a theory of technical equality prevails, the 
poor and miserable men become the victims of minds 
which have neither nobility nor superiority; mere 
knacks they are, that avail themselves of the theory 
that spawns them. 

If all men's proficiencies were absolutely equal, all 
opportunities would disappear. All men would be 
impartially cursed by the monotony of being fac- 
similes of each other. Motion and life cannot begin 
till the mass settles into differing parts ; then Nature 
selects her moment and makes her first gesture. Thus 
the nebula resolved itself into planets of varying bulk 
and movement, to bestow a choiring coherence on the 
sky. So men would be to-day a herd of mammoths 
if their structure had not involved the first benefit of 
inequality. When that pledges itself to generalize 
all opportunities, the benefit is prolonged and refined ; 
the more brutal distinctions begin to disappear, and 
no passion but that of emulation is fomented. 

Natural inequalities, which occur through vari- 
eties of cerebral structure and chances for culture, 
appeal to the Republic for a reconciling principle that 
shall preserve a sense of divine love and justice, and 
mediate between fatality of birth and the native title 
to all opportunities. The country is the atoning in- 
carnation that steps in between God and man, lifts all 



y 



1 86 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

maimed lives into consideration, and assumes their 
liabilities. Its principle is this : the small and mean 
men are valuable, and that is their relation to God. 

Every man has by birth some function, place, and 
service, and must have some opportunity. All the 
persons are the country : the land is nothing except 
for the persons to stand on while they are country ; 
the institutions are nothing but personal conveniences ; 
rails and telegraphs, states, governments, trades and 
industries are only expressions of the personal con- 
sciousness. When you say, " all the persons, without 
distinction of sex or color, are the country," you en- 
dow it with all the intelligence, and surrender to it the 
only advantage it can ever have over all the ignorance. 
You liberate all the latent superiority, and give it con- 
trol over all the barbarous and all the refined inferior- 
ity. Either one or the other is a real evil until all 
the persons are let loose to put it down. Three 
hundred thousand highly intelligent and well-dressed 
egotists will plunge a country into the vast embar- 
rassments of blood and debt : thirty million ordinary 
people will drag her out again. There is enough man- 
hood and honesty permeating the mass to neutralize 
its own follies. Cut down the mass by millions, in 
order to cull the number that seem to you capable of 
exercising the function of governing, and the follies 
grow rampant that would be checked and counter- 
balanced by all the sense of all the persons. There 
must be great masses of people for yielding the pre- 
ponderance of moral feeling that you require in every 
critical moment. Who are the best persons? The 
best feeling is the best. You cannot select your per- 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 187 

sons ; but take them all, and nature will save you the 
trouble of selection. Not a drop of perfume will you 
get out of a thousand, or ten thousand rose-leaves. 
Boil them down by acres, and the subtle diffusion is 
distilled. 

The Swiss city of Basle is connected with the oppo- 
site shore by a bridge that is famous as the scene of 
mediaeval encounters ; they were animated by the 
excessive mutual hatred of the people who lived at 
either'* end of it. On the Basle side there stands a 
tower upon which a huge face, with a tongue lolling 
out, still reminds us of the standing contempt of the 
inhabitants for their opposite neighbors. Color and 
dialect, manners and customs, are the bridges whose 
either end is pertinaciously fought for. They have 
kept us apart when they might just as well be used 
for bonds of union, since all feet travel in the same 
way, although the faces look as if they were loath to 
follow. These physical peculiarities of an original 
diversity, or of varieties which have sprung up in the 
struggles of races for existence, mask a deeper uni- 
formity of the blood, which represents the universality 
of the moral sense. Mental differences, also, there 
are, which seem to have put forth these physical signs 
in correspondence ; and manners partake of the dis- 
crimination. But the moral sense is permanently the 
same ; and, as it binds all men together, it reconciles 
all men to God. You cannot point to a vital differ- 
ence between the conscience of the East and West. 
Cunning and falseness can be found everywhere, but 
also a prevailing sense of right and wrong. Men are 
constantly breaking the golden rule, but the rule is an 



155 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

original property of every race, and its infractions are 
judged by its own cogency, in the same style, every- 
where. Men vary in their habits of taking advantage 
of each other, but they agree that advantages should 
not be taken. Nations may be distinguished for the 
prevalence of some vice or two, but they are all alike 
in a general sense of what is vicious ; and the best 
spirits in all countries disclaim the evils and recom- 
mend the virtues of human nature. 

How mischievous it will be if people continue to 
allow their antipathies to influence their politics, es- 
pecially when the whole world sends to us its repre- 
sentative complexions, as we stand midway between 
the West of Europe and the East of Asia, like power- 
ful youth, towards whose shoulders the father and the 
mother stretch forth a hand. This gathering of mani- 
fold forces to stock a new cradle of mankind is deter- 
mined by the instinct of humanity to be born again, 
that it may at length enjoy its inalienable rights ; 
and every stranger contributes mental difference, but 
spiritual identity. Which is the larger and more dis- 
interested function of his nature, which the more re- 
generative, which yields the diviner element towards a 
reconstruction of society? The conscience which ac- 
companies this irresistible exodus towards a promised 
land. Will conscience swamp the country? No : but 
smartness will, and the brutality of mature exclusive- 
ness. We ought to welcome all these illiterate and 
unfashionable children, who cannot help bringing the 
raw material of moral sense to repair our waste of it 
at every pore. 

The art of living is the art of bringing into use all 



AN AMERICAN ATONEMENT. 1 89 

the moral sense there is. And this requires a coopera- 
tion of all sexes and conditions, to set free unexpected 
advantages. For the opportunity which Religion 
seeks is simply a soul ; when she has found one, its 
emancipation from ignorance and mean neighbor- 
hoods begins. The soul need not be gifted ; can you 
add a perfume to the violet of conscience? Relig- 
ion stoops to find the humility that makes her mag- 
nificent. All that she asks is, that some modest soul 
shall be suffering for the touch of her hand, which 
decomposes poverty and liberates it into great expan- 
sion of force and brightness. Take clear water, enough 
to balance a single grain of weight, and notice how in- 
sipid and colorless it is, and not to be suspected of any 
pretension to be an agent. But Professor Faraday lays 
upon it the hand of decomposition, and forth leaps an 
electrical force which he estimated at eight hundred 
thousand discharges of his large Leyden battery. And 
he declared that the chemical action of a single grain 
of water on four grains of zinc would yield electricity 
equal in quantity to a powerful thunder-storm. God's 
will, that melts or shatters, is imprisoned in small 
bulks. How it thunders and lightens when a moral 
Yea leaps from a million nobodies into the reconciling 
equilibrium of God ! 

The economies that are still hidden in the refuse- 
heaps of civilization are destined to reenforce Religion. 
Use and beauty are waiting to be raked out of the 
rubbish to serve her turn. The London scavengers 
remove the ash-heaps from all the houses of the me- 
tropolis. In them are waste pieces of coal, and the 
" breeze," or coal-dust, and half-burnt ashes. After 



190 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

selling the larger pieces of coal to the poor, the refuse 
" breeze " is enough to bake all the bricks that are 
used in rebuilding the city. What object is there 
without a law of its own, waiting to be put to its ap- 
propriate use? In building the city of God, Religion 
is not deceived by appearances. Give her just a soul, 
and she is not too proud to utilize what God was 
proud enough to make. 

If it were* not dangerous to use old phraseology, 
which the sects have worn to rags and infected with 
theft* whims, there is reason why we should say, " God 
was in Christ reconciling man unto himself," because 
he was one of God's natural opportunities, and all of 
them are called to the work of redemption. Every 
good thing liberates ; it may be without comeliness, 
despised and rejected, and its visage marred, but 
Religion can derive from it comfort and perpetuity. 

We have this ministry of reconciliation. It is not 
confided to a class, but is held in trust by all right 
thinking and living. It enlists the whole of our intel- 
ligence, uses all the tools of science and civilization, 
and when it restores virtue to our bodies is certain that 
it will redeem our souls. 



VIII. 

FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 

THERE can be no argument drawn from Scrip- 
ture, if the purpose be to find whether praying 
has any intrinsic authority in human nature ; for 
Scripture represents prayer as directed towards the 
most heterogeneous objects, and has a bias towards 
supposing all of them secured. Books and traditions 
may record the ancient methods, but they neither im- 
pair nor explain the instinct which tends to personal 
expressiveness towards divine powers. If we under- 
took to account for all the texts that put implicit con- 
fidence in praying, we should be involved in a dreary 
exegesis, when we might make it all superfluous by 
showing, and putting a strong accent upon, the pith 
of the question. The pith always lies in the law : it 
attracts, like amber, all light and groundless customs, 
which cling to something that is essentially different 
from themselves. It is a pity that man values them 
because he sees that they are attracted ; they are the 
accidents of neighborhood, the fluff and feathers which 
eddy about in the air of every age, shaken out of crude 
intelligence, and drawn into the whirl of real forces. 
They must be picked off and swept away. But they 



I92 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

are so strongly attracted, that perhaps what is their 
pertinacity may appear to be rudeness in the hand that 
ventures to detach them. 

The prince, in the fairy tale, went hunting, and the 
holla of the chase brought him out upon a mountain- 
spur, whence he saw the growth of a hundred years 
that hid and imprisoned the castle where Beauty slept. 
His instinct shouldered a path through the matted un- 
dergrowth, till he penetrated into the court-yard where 
all forms of life stood arrested in the acts of a century 
ago. Through cobwebbed vestibules, sprawling scul- 
lions, frozen men-at-arms, slim serving-maids in mid 
coquetry, and roysterers petrified in the moment of 
their spurious inspiration, his quivering heart guided 
him to the one breathing centre that gathered all this 
motley life around it ; the only pulse that was not 
menial. Time-honored postures and venerable sleep 
hardly raised his curiosity. Perhaps they suffered 
from his disdain. But some things may be pardoned 
to a man who cannot wait to be properly announced 
by an obsolete chamberlain, on the threshold of the 
kiss that rallies Beauty to his arms. All the hangers- 
on rouse also, but go about their business. She only 
is the law of all the scene. 



Dr. Hooker, in his Himalayan Journals, describes 
the praying-mill, used by the inhabitants of Thibet, as 
a leathern cylinder placed upright in a frame ; a pro- 
jecting piece of iron strikes a little bell at each one of 
the revolutions, which are caused by an elbowed axle 
and a string. The written prayers are placed within 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 1 93 

the cylinder, and whoever pulls the string repeats his 
prayers as often as the bell rings. There is also a 
kind that is made to be turned by water ; on the cylin- 
der the words, " Om Mani Padmi Om," — Hail to Him 
of the Lotus and Jewel — are painted, and a spindle, 
which terminates in a wheel, keeps these revolving. 
When we consider how laborious is most of the public 
praying in all countries, this is the greatest labor-saving 
machine ever invented. And Baron Schilling must be 
regarded as one of the principal benefactors of the 
human race, for he presented the Mongol Llamaites in 
China with two hundred and fifty million impressions 
of this prayer.* He had it set up so as to go five 
thousand times upon a large sheet, and sent them fifty 
thousand copies of that sheet. One may calculate that 
if a machine can be made to revolve five hundred 
times in a minute with one of these sheets inside, the 
effect is the same as if two and a half millions of 
tongues pronounced the prayer ; quite the same. 
There is, indeed, in a private museum at St. Peters- 
burg, a little ball, which is attested by a long docu- 
ment in the Thibetan language to have been produced 
out of nothing by prayer that was kept up for forty 
days. These balls, so originated, of course are rare ; 
but the Llamaites believe that, once procured, they can 
propagate of themselves. However that may be, the 
little precatory cylinder is a great convenience, for the 
natives keep them spinning in their laps while they sit 
and converse together. According to the doctrine of 
the Mussulman it is the salvation of the world, for they 

* J. G. Kohl's Russia, p. 91. Am. Ed. 
9 



194 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

believe that if a moment should occur during which 
the name of Allah was nowhere offered up, it would 
be a chance for chaos. The Greeks and Russians have 
a method that must be more trying to the individual : 
it is that of saying Gospodi fomilui twelve times in a 
breath, — literally, then, without inspiration. 

We smile at these attempts of the finite mind to 
catch the infinite in a mill and extort the daily grist. 
Perhaps we subscribe to missionary funds for opening 
the slant eyes of Mongols and Tartars to the unsub- 
stantial nature of machine-praying. But when the 
worthy clergyman, in the course of his routine on Sun- 
day morning, said, " O Lord, thou knowest not half 
the wickedness there is in this place," and another, no 
less worthy, and a model of learning and grace, ground 
out a petition that the Lord would make " all the in- 
temperate temperate, and all the industrious dustri- 
ous," we perceive that the string finds some adit 
through the Himalayan range, and dangles here. 
Baron Schilling's stereotyped contrivance~cannot yield 
a greater number of phrases ; and Daniel Webster's 
drum-beat of England, which follows the morning sun 
around the world, is paralleled in continuous sonority 
and emptiness one morning, at least, of every week. 
For the public prayers of the civilized are watered 
with phraseology which comes dripping from the well 
of memory, and which, by this time, we should think 
might be learned above by rote, if the invisible has 
ears that tolerate. Do we not know the style of every 
meeting-house, and the different contrivances to so 
conclude a prayer as to splice it with the shore-end of 
the invisible ? A friend of mine, who was much puz- 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 1 95 

zled to account for the genesis of a stocking, surmised, 
at length, that the women must imagine the first round, 
and then knit on to that. Is it improper to suggest 
that more than one imaginary round of ascription fails 
to start any thing that can weave the comfort of heaven 
for the soul ? 

But our false praying is not limited to these tricks 
of pulpit iteration, repeated from books, or dropped 
into the mosaic of extemporaneous discourse ; nor to 
those parade-prayers which open festivals and town- 
meetings, and sometimes from the court-house bench 
supplicate that the judge's decisions may be overruled 
for good. But the whole modern theory of prayer is 
vitiated by various suppositions, that heaven needs to 
be informed upon our domestic and public matters, 
that a natural law may be modified or suspended at 
human entreaty, that certain gifts may be had. for the 
asking and not for the practising, that our whole vital 
economy can let on the invisible as by the turning of 
a faucet. The most mischievous of these suppositions 
is the one that the laws of nature are not irreversible* 
but lie open to irruptions of ardent longing, so that the 
divine mind may be influenced to reconsider itself at 
the importunity of its creatures. The notion of Pastor 
Muller, who founded the Rauhe Haus at Hamburg, 
was that, whenever the funds for this undertaking fell 
short, he could always induce heaven to impress some 
person, unknown to him, to send the requisite amount. 
If we had no alternative we might accept his convic- 
tion as the genuine interpretation of the fact that 
money never failed him in the direst emergencies. 
But as his project became known, its piety was a 



I96 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

spontaneous and unspoken prayer to all like-minded 
souls, and their instinct did not need the urgency of 
heaven. It was already heavenly, and flowed towards 
heaven's charity by that law of fraternal intercourse 
which heaven seems to have framed especially to save 
its time, and prevent incessant errand-going. Noble 
people are God's labor-saving devices : they are re- 
sponses to prayers before they are offered. They know 
what we have need of before we ask them. 

There are establishments in Germany for curing 
disease by prayer, just as in Greece there used to be 
temples of yEsculapius where the priests professed to 
cure diseases by dreaming. The temples were built 
in the midst of beautiful scenery, in spots where every 
advantage of pure air and running water existed ; and 
the patient, removed from all annoyances, confined to 
strict habits of diet and exercise, attributed his cure 
to the regimen which might be hinted in his dreams. 
The dreaming was a regular business, imposed with 
religious observance, and it is not wonderful that the 
patient had, during sleep, suggestions made from his 
physical condition through a brain that expected and 
put faith in them. Nature was not jealous when the 
waking man referred her sanative influences to some 
alterant that he dreamed would do him good. His 
instinct was indeed a part of her process ; and many 
a lucky dream enriched the medical science of an- 
tiquity. 

The Protestant Pastor Blumhardt is at the head of 
an establishment at Boll Bad, in the Black Forest, 
w T here he undertakes to cure disease by prayer. It is 
a cheerful place, where patients who have no organic 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 1 97 

diseases, but are only in delicate health, get pure air 
and good food, lead a natural life in the midst of quiet 
and simple habits, with plenty of exercise, some Rhine 
wine, and the Pastor's praying. He attributes their 
improvement only to the praying, but admits that it 
has no effect in surgical cases. The thread of his ad- 
dress to heaven cannot tie an artery, nor will its 
stringency brace up the sagging aneurism. But the 
patients enjoy, with all the advantages of nature, the 
rare good fortune that the Pastor's praying consumes 
the time that he might otherwise devote to doctoring, 
so that his supplications are the only drug. 

So Dorothea Trudel founded a praying establishment 
for invalids in the village of Mannedorf, on the left bank 
of Lake Zurich, because St. James said the prayer of 
faith should save the sick. She was greatly persecuted 
by the doctors, who clung to their faith in those amu- 
lets called prescriptions, and preferred to send the 
patient himself into the invisible rather than pretend 
that it might intervene. But her establishment has 
acquired great fame, for the reason that her patients, 
drawn largely from the class of persons afflicted with 
mental disorders, find every soothing and restoring in- 
fluence of nature and good sense. The secret of both 
systems is in the decisive chances secured to Nature 
to knit up the sleave of care, which a restless or dissi- 
pated life had ravelled. If music could be substituted 
for the praying, a true function of heaven would assist 
in every case : for David's harp-strings vibrated with 
intercession, and wove a law of God around the tu- 
mult of the kingly heart. 

There is a multitude of disorders in which the 



1 9$ AMERICAN RELIGION. 

nerves seem shredded into fine torments, or the relation 
and balance of the different brain-cells is dislocated, 
ideas that should naturally cohere are torn apart, till 
moodiness and mania are fed by every ascending drop 
of blood. Nature's hospital has been already founded 
for these by the divine sanity which anticipates the 
prayers extorted by our sufferings. Her retreats are 
full of simple remedies : as when the first step 
towards the restoration of an insane person has been 
made b}' interesting him in an employment that seizes 
the attention and leads to fresh coordination of his 
thoughts, — when, for instance, one who is violent and 
impracticable sees people fishing and takes a fancy 
to the task. He engages in it, becomes amused by 
the action, begins to mingle harmlessly with his fel- 
lows, because God's law of continuity restores the 
native associations of the mind. 

Whenever it is observed that the outpourings of 
tender minds, which have been attracted to the side of 
sorrow and debility, can soothe and uplift the soul, 
and divide, as lusty swimmers do, the tumult, the 
error is apt to be made that this is because God is 
exorable. But it is man who is exorable, and the 
prayers play like the voices of instruments upon his 
suffering. The comrade hastens to his side when he 
sees him fall, puts the canteen to the white lips, 
moves the struck form beneath the shade of trees, and 
conjures up the expectation that the wound is not too 
deep ; but, if it be too deep, all the regimental chap- 
lains cannot make it shallow. The divided artery 
ebbs as their prayers flow ; heaven cannot use them for 
tourniquet : perhaps it counts every drop of the heroic 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 1 99 

blood with pity equal to that of the sad groups who 
lean upon their arms, to watch it slip away. But its 
intervention has already been conceded through their 
pity, and heaven says, " The means you have upon 
the spot, the help you can rally, is the aid which I 
bestow : if I had more you should not see him die." 

It is very strange that in speculating upon the effi- 
cacy of prayer, we should not perceive how every 
event that is unavoidable is the test. Does any reason 
exist why an event should be avoidable ? The reason 
must be either in the laws that are involved, or in 
some special exception. The exception may be spon- 
taneously bestowed, or in answer to human entreaty. 
But if the reason why an event should be avoidable be 
comprised within the law of the case, heaven need not 
make an exception. If it be not in the law, and if 
the impending event requires that a special interposi- 
tion shall make up for the deficiency, then comes the 
test question, Why does it not? Does heaven pick 
its cases, or is the prayer not agonizing enough to take 
God's will by violence ? What kind of a theory of 
efficacy is that which the facts force to prove that 
prayer may be quite as ineffective as effective ? The 
terrible refutation ascends from every floating raft 
where sailors lift a desire as deep as the ocean beneath 
them to some pity farther than the sky. Heaven's 
answer is, that whoso lives to eat his last comrade 
may be wafted to land if a breeze springs up. The 
real pity that is aboard another vessel heaves in sight 
too late. Prayer should have filled the sails as taut 
as marble, and held the tiller by the desperate sailors 
afar off, and thrilled the needle with direction. Is 



200 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

heaven, then, fastidious? What quality in praying 
is it that compels its intervention? Saints and sin- 
ners, well-balanced and distorted natures, fibre coarse 
and fine, recklessness and fidelity, the whole of human 
nature learns from the impartiality of every year that 
God is not a respecter of persons ; for the laws which 
bring rescue are incompetent to decide upon charac- 
ter. 

Sometimes you fling your heart so close to the 
breast of heaven, that every angel there may count 
your pulse, and interpret its tumults into drums that 
beat to summon dear deliverance, to bid light rally to 
some glazing eye, strength to the side of some slow 
attenuation, if God will respond to the spotlessness 
of a whole household, and spare its bliss. Is it spared, 
and not by law? Is it not spared, and in spite of 
entreaty? It is strange that men do not accept on 
this question the test of the inevitable. 

In the countries where rain abounds, official rain- 
beggars find their occupation gone. But in rainless 
districts they still make a merit of the occasional 
shower. This is not more inconsistent than our induc- 
tion that an event may be ascribed to prayer which is 
accounted for by law. During the great Irish famine, 
the adjurations to the Holy Mother, and the invocation 
of all the saints, — nay, what was far more moving to 
infinite pity, the distress of millions of Irishmen, — 
did not restore a single potato to soundness. And the 
mothers who watched, out of eyes seared by famine, 
their children also decaying, discovered after prayer 
that the trouble was in the failure of a crop, and the 
whole broad, fertile heaven would not extemporize 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 201 

another. As much of God's pity as could get on board 
a few vessels laden with the wheat of Chicago, the 
apples, corn, potatoes of New England, strove a feeble 
intervention. God was not prevailed on to show us 
the famine : we saw it, and saw how prayer whitened 
on its lip ; the gaunt whimpers borrowed the sea, as if 
their tears had made it, that they might go voyaging for 
pity westward, since the sky above was foodless. We 
could not reach all mouths, but the test-event feeds 
every mind with the religious truth, that all the prov- 
idence there is nature and mankind create. Not a 
sparrow falls without His care. Yes, but it falls. 
Was the agony in Gethsemane official or natural? 
The cross was natural, and stood rooted against 
prayer. Or was all this only a dramatic tableau, in 
which the prayer filled the role of incompetency 
merely to round out the piece ? Providence builds its 
own test-theory upon its own impartiality. 

The body-servant of Stonewall Jackson, issuing 
sometimes from his master's tent, would confide to 
others his opinion that there would be something 
to pay soon, — an unmentionable locality would be to 
pay, — " Massa Jackson had such a drefful fit o' pray- 
in'." Misguided earnestness can concentrate its plans 
and temper by the act of prayer. Jackson fought the 
battle of the next day upon his knees, because it is an 
involuntary gesture made by every strong mind that 
heaps itself up towards the future enterprise. Some- 
thing was to pay at Cedar Mountain : was it because 
Jackson prayed, or because Banks blundered ? or will 
you create an escape from this dilemma by maintain- 
ing that Banks blundered because Jackson prayed? 



202 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

The prayers of an earnest man like Stonewall Jack- 
son are only signals to the neighborhood that his 
plans are good, his temper high, his whole soul eager 
to test its combination, and that nothing can be ex- 
pected of heaven unless to-morrow's devotion brings 
it. To-morrow is already mortgaged to the devotion ; 
the prayer is nothing but the deed that is signed and 
sealed. At the very moment when the stern Crom- 
wells of history break into prayer, it is a hint that 
praying has become superfluous. The purpose is at 
white-heat, and heaven can add nothing to it ; for to- 
morrow's opportunity is already on the ground and 
came there by the usual conveyances. It is worth all 
such praying to see that the good or evil occasion has 
come. Both sides will pray, but the toughest temper 
wins. Each side will try to stimulate itself by acis 
of devotion ; but heaven makes a tour of inspection, 
and discovers whose powder is the driest. Perhaps wet 
powder will be suddenly kiln-dried by desperate cir- 
cumstances in mid-tide of battle. Providence endowed 
desperation with this talent long before it took to 
devoutness, and has left at Marathon and elsewhere 
the texts of its primeval purpose. All parties are 
quite convinced that there is a Lord of Hosts, and 
make no scruples to approach him with what they 
have in hand or heart ; but he is an unbribable director 
of quality by the smooth curve of David's sling, and 
lays bulk prostrate. 

Critical moments give men opportunity to notice 
that heaven has made provision that goodness shall 
always exceed evil by a certain per cent. It needs 
only to be hard pressed to discover this latent quality 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 203 

that secures the final superiority to heaven, and makes 
the world possible, without exacting a single phrase 
from man. Both good and evil indulge copiously in 
phrases which claim the God of battles, before an en- 
counter, and reward him with Te Deums after. But 
God sings his own anthem in the event, however pro- 
tracted through various fortunes of the fighters, all of 
whom serve him to a turn ; and whether they suppli- 
cate or imprecate, it must be all one to a power who 
depends upon putting goodness into straits, and dotes 
upon it that he may see it harassed into the superior- 
ity that throws at last the doubles of victory. 

What a fine disdain there must be in heaven for all 
the prayers that undertake to coax laws and qualities 
into events ! Je-fTerson Davis had recourse to appoint- 
ing days of humiliation, because men who prayed as 
well as they fought, and women who wept tears as 
salt as any that channelled the New England bloom, 
could not win the final per cent ; for that had been 
previously settled on the Rights of Man, before a shot 
was heard, or a single aspiration struggled through 
the powder-cloud of war. And the North appointed 
Fasts, that all the clergymen might entreat heaven to 
reflect if Bull-Runs and Ball's Bluffs were not mis- 
takes, and to hurry up advantages in consideration of 
the phrase that we were miserable sinners. So we 
were, and had been through thirty years of compro- 
mising, all of which had been clerically bespoken, and 
came to pass to die inward satisfaction of believers in 
supplication. So we were, guilty as the South, to 
such an extent that we must perceive how reconstruc- 
tion blossoms from the feculence of both parties, and 



204 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

independently of the prayers of either. Both the 
North and South had been educated to believe that 
events depended practically to some extent upon en- 
treaties. So were the Catholics and Huguenots of 
France. We should say that the patriotism of the 
Huguenot lifted to heaven prayers after its own heart, 
and that they deserved to earn eventual supremacy for 
religious liberty. We can even venture to speculate 
that if the precious blood of St. Bartholomew had 
won the cast, Robespierre and Danton would not 
have been tormented with the thirst for more. But 
one would say now that heaven only had the object 
to scatter the fine quality of the Huguenot through 
every land. He became a slaveholder in South Caro- 
lina, and prayed with as much faith and smouldering 
earnestness as ever. But he lost his case, — in France 
where he deserved it, in America where he did not. 
Freedom has an architect who never mistakes human 
breath for blocks of marble. Say what we will, 
Catholicism must have had a quality as well as a 
majority : otherwise David's stone would have gone 
again crashing through Goliah's forehead. Is heaven 
sometimes flattered by High Mass, and sometimes by 
extemporaneous entreaty? Mankind is drawn upon 
the track of a long-headed purpose, transacts business 
of joy and sorrow at every station, and its energizing 
into phrases can neither check the train nor put fuel 
underneath its motive power. Conscience is on board ; 
intelligence is the meal furnished at all the stopping 
places, where wells are dug and wood is hewn to 
exhale into genuine momentum for this journey out of 
fatalism into freedom. 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 205 

If we can rid our religious feeling of this old claim 
that the drift of history, the accidents of life, the for- 
tunes of the individual cannot depend upon laws of 
nature unless they are supplemented by our devotions, 
we can stand in a clear place, with so much rubbish 
that interrupted the view piled on either hand. As 
soon as we are thus disencumbered, we move freely 
to and fro with this question : How is it then that we 
cannot help praying? Of all our instincts is this the 
only one that turns into a vagabond, without a legal 
permit to beg, left to forage on the unsuspecting 
neighbors? What account is to be given of the uni- 
versal tendency of man to pile up all his preferences 
or his antipathies till they stand level with a threshold 
over which words may carry them into the divine 
consideration? Is this done because otherwise we 
cannot arrive there, and cannot get commended to a 
power that serves us? Though God knows what we 
have need of before we ask him, must we still ask, 
because his knowledge will not move towards us on 
any other terms? We have freed our deck of the 
litter of notions that partiality for special providences 
scattered over it : as we float off the bar can we swing 
round into confidence that moral and spiritual gifts 
depend upon the asking? Or if they do not, whither 
are we sailing with this instinct after God, that is the 
compass on the wide w r aste, this ardor that streams 
from every mast and spar, these moments that fill with 
sudden breezes, we know not whence, and put under- 
neath us the rapture of motion, and draw every shred 
of us taut into a silence which declares that we career ! 

And what is to be said to the discovery that every 



2o6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

kind of misguided moral sense shares the same rap- 
tures, and strains towards the same harbor, — the 
possession of God ; that a passion of entreaty has 
ennobled all lost causes which have drawn the blood 
and tears of men ; that every zone exhales in fervid 
preferences which Buddha, Allah, Jehovah, Jove or 
Lord are supposed to respect and gratify? Perhaps 
this discovery of a universal instinct is just what we 
need to make before we can interpret it. 

H. W. Beecher, in a Lecture-Room Talk upon 
prayer, asks, " Ought we not to pray for direct spiritual 
gifts? " — and answers thus : " Yes, I think we ought ; 
but I think that whenever a man asks God for any 
spiritual gift, the next step should be to ask, 4 Have I 
not asked God for something that I can get myself ? 
Have I not asked God for something that he has made 
provision to give me in an indirect way?'" 

This may be good vestry-room logic, to hold a con- 
fiding audience together, but it vanishes in a well- 
ventilated space. If there be something that a man 
can get for himself, his first step should be not to ask 
any thing in heaven or earth to give it to him. His 
next step should be to procure it. " As the plough 
follows words, so God rewards prayers." This prov- 
erb of William Blake reminds us of Hesiod's direc- 
tion to the farmer to pray to Jove and Ceres, but with 
his hand upon the plough-tail. 

Is there no point, then, pursues Mr. Beecher, where 
God, finding that something is inaccessible to a man 
by the natural laws of his constitution, will intervene, 
and give it to him in a special manner? Yes: he 
thinks there is. He can understand how Peter, for 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 207 

want of a pass-key, should require an angel to let him 
out of prison : and how, wdien Paul and Silas w r ere 
praying in prison, with no files and saws by which to 
effect an escape, a lively earthquake should be detailed 
to shake open the doors and set them free. So Mr. 
Beecher pulls the string of the Llamaite cylinder to 
summon a conventional deity. If something be inac- 
cessible to a man by the laws of his natural constitu- 
tion, what is it but a divine decree that it should 
continue to be so? But if a man's nature breaks into 
prayer, that is the instinctive response of all its gifts 
toward the infinite giving. 

Let us drop illustration into the depth of this sub- 
ject, that perhaps some draught of it may be lifted to 
the lip. Through flat and unprofitable moments, a 
poet is waiting for the next consent of his imagination. 
The bed of every gift, that lately sparkled or thun- 
dered as the freshet of the hills sent its surprises down, 
lies empty, waiting for the master passion to open the 
sluice when it hears the steps of coming waves. The 
poet's nature strains against the dumb gates of his 
body and his mood. With power and longing he 
heaves them open, and is brimfull again with the 
rhythm that collects from the whole face of Nature : 
the hill-side, the ravine, the drifting cloud, the vapors 
just arrived from ocean, the drops that flowers nod 
with to flavor the stream, the human smiles that col- 
onize both banks of it, — all passions, all delights hurry 
to possess his thought, crowd into the precincts of his 
person, pain him with the tumult in which they offer 
him obedience, remind him of his last joy in their 
companionship, and will not let him go till he ennobles 



2o8 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

them by bursting into expression. Relief flows down 
with every perfect word : the congested soul bleeds 
into the lyric and the canto ; the poet's burden be- 
comes light-hearted ; and the supreme moment of his 
travail, when it breaks in showers of his emotion, 
cools and comforts him. He must die or express him- 
self. All the blood in the earth's arteries is running 
through his heart ; all the stars in the sky are set in 
his brain's dome : this life and light must be dis- 
charged into a word, and the poet restored to health 
and peace again. Goethe used to say that when his 
imagination accumulated thus, as it was fed by near 
suggestions of his own life, or from the head-waters of 
thought, he was nothing but disquiet, till it slipped 
away through every line he wrote, and gave him an 
answer of serenity. He might mistake it for a touch 
of the infinite satisfaction. It was the olive-branch 
brought home to him from the subsiding turbulence 
of his emotion that covered the tops of every gift, and 
had to cut a channel to release him. 

This mental gesture has in it the essential quality of 
praying. The poet asks for nothing, but receives the 
gratification of a nature already framed to be sated 
and soothed when its gifts toil up into a clear place. 
Cortez and his men, possessed and heated by a wild 
surmise, hewed their way through the dense chappo- 
ral, till a whole Pacific lay in the orbit of their eyes. 
Enterprising manhood carries along its own answer 
into every entreaty of its powers to be developed and 
to reach their highest pitch. And when a man voices 
the mood of tenderness, of confidence, of expectation 
and of gladness that has risen within him, and breaks 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 200, 

into God's open air with caressing epithets, his mood 
reaches its answer in its own climax, and he is satis- 
fied that God has given him just what he has 
earned. 

It cannot be different with the moods that culminate 
into regret and confession of a maimed, unfaithful life. 
They rush into consciousness, and see themselves ; 
the act of launching an entreaty floats them into the 
salutary bitterness of being broad awake, thoroughly 
live and aware. A man has been so organized that 
all his moods, in which his average character finds 
their poetic expression, shall discharge themselves into 
a calmness that benefits him, because it was reached 
through the personal disquiet which breaks up his 
illusions. The sight of himself is a preordained 
opportunity for amendment. These answers to prayer 
lie latent in the constitution, where God patiently 
awaits their germinating, confident that he need inter- 
fere no more than he does when the lyric soars, the 
tragedy weeps and terrifies, the symphony mourns 
towards its own deliverance, the picture flings its 
beauties on the wall. His inspiration is previous and 
constant : not subsequently recruited to the pitch of 
an entreaty. Why should it be, if we are so framed 
that a feeling cannot be profound that does not an- 
nounce itself ? A man may think he is the master of 
a speculation, or that some province of knowledge is 
familiar to him. But every thing lies in the condition 
of a nebula, till its own stress lends motion to it, when 
he can organize in the symmetry of expression what he 
thinks he owns. Not till that moment does he own it. 
Not till then does it reward him with its organic satis- 



2IO AMERICAN RELIGION. 

faction. So, difficult problems over which our gifts 
brood and starve with waiting are no progeny of 
ours till they chip the shell and run warm into our 
content. When Kepler's soul wrestled with planet 
after planet in the midnight, and threw them on the 
floor of that silence where they lifted visor and con- 
fessed to him the law of their distances from each 
other, his tumult of possession, his hour of acceding 
to the throne of that idea, broke into the exclamation, 
"I think thy thoughts after thee, O God!" Devout- 
ness is the announcement that every success makes of 
its superiority to prayer. It has thought heaven's 
thoughts, and felt its emotions, before it can grow bold 
and hot enough to importune. " God allows us the 
epithet only after the fact." 

The same organic felicity rises higher than smiles, 
and unlocks from either eye the torrent that cuts the 
smiles up and denudes their surfaces. We cast our- 
selves by the side of the children of our hope, or the 
comrades of our friendship, and weep each access of 
our sense of bereavement away into the quiet that 
follows exhausted emotion. Sweetness mingles with 
the equipoise which the nature purchases at this dear 
rate. If our despair has besieged heaven with a claim 
to be understood and comforted, its climax subsides 
into its answer, till time brings the perfect consolation 
of a scarcity of tears. We have thrown ourselves 
upon the bosom of expression ; long repressed feel- 
ings have sobbed themselves to sleep with their arms 
around a recollection, and a dream that reality is still 
possessed plays upon the quiet face. Reality is as 
distant from us as the antipodes : but a tide reaches 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 21 [ 

our eyelid, propelled from that distance, and lifts it 
open and drips there till thickening smiles absorb it. 
God's answer is already in the love that refuses to be 
comforted till it has been cloyed with its own em- 
phasis. 

Human expression varies, but the law remains the 
same. Heaven is no more attracted into compassion 
by the symbol of scarifying the flesh and maiming 
the limbs, by the howls and rages of the Syrian or 
Celtic temper, than by the suppressed composure of 
the Quaker, whose face may be as impassive as a 
grave, but whose dead lies buried in it. The formulas 
of agony feed upon the flora of every meridian, and 
draw their color from the leaf; so that the Esqui- 
maux derives from his sensations an answer different 
from the Polynesian in the terms of its comfort : but 
the real response is in the expressiveness which ex- 
hausts the individual grief, and is as heavenly in the 
howl of a Fijian as in the miserere of the Sistine 
Chapel, or the Christian's claim that the Comforter 
shall speedily arrive. It arrives, and has never yet 
shown an imperfect knowledge of geography, and is 
in a ratio to the population as direct as the deaths 
are. I know some cases where it does not seem to 
arrive : but it is not for want of prayer. Rachel is a 
constitutional temper that refuses to be comforted. 

It must be that a divine mind foresaw to make 
human nature adequate, on the whole, to every emer- 
gency, so that the surprises of sorrow should only lib- 
erate from their own bitterness a tonic to rectify the 
disorder which they introduce : as Mithridates had so 
inoculated his system with little doses of poison, that 



212 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

whatever kind was secretly administered became its 
own antidote as soon as swallowed. 

In South America, there is a tribe of Araucan 
Indians, who maintain, says Mr. Helps, that prayer is 
needless, because their gods are so beneficent that they 
are sure to confer upon men all things that it is good 
for them to have. Nevertheless the Araucans show 
their gratitude for this goodness by humble offerings. 
This tribe, which was never subdued and brought under 
the control of the white man, yields to the true phil- 
osophy that justifies the universal instinct. Prayer is 
the gratitude of every gift, and also its cogency. Gifts 
excite feelings of hope, veneration, dependence, grati- 
tude, and the whole instinct rises Godward. If we keep 
out the notion of affecting God, how beautiful and 
natural is the whole movement of a man to establish a 
sincere friendship with the Mind who framed his gifts. 
When it is entirely disinterested, without any reserva- 
tion of expecting to alter one divine intention, because 
it knows beforehand that such intentions, of divine 
necessity, must always be the best whether we are on 
friendly terms with God or not, then how ennobling 
becomes this spontaneous proffer of our best things ! 
This unaffected homage puts us on a friendly footing 
with the whole of Nature, and God's perfect purpose 
in all things includes us too : we offer incense as 
frankly as the fields, with no more afterthought, nor 
pretence of a claim beyond the gift of growing and 
producing. So that the Creator inhales at the same 
moment his flowers, and the gladness which they 
propagate when their pollen strays into human hearts. 
As the world is continually offering up its beauty and 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 213 

its use, and God, seeing that it is good, takes satisfac- 
tion in His work, so mankind may exhale in the 
prayers of natural desire : these rise up, the unforced 
tribute of things that reach the felicity of fragrance. 
And the rose is content with its own : it has no hanker- 
ing to smell like a lily, nor to make its own scent more 
penetrating ; it vanishes heavenward through the 
delight which it generates in us, and God knows 
flowers by that means. We have a right to think 
that he takes satisfaction in this reflex action of the 
nature he has made. The " golden vials, full of 
odors, which are the prayers of the saints," are the 
delights of our own symmetry ; they cannot bear to 
be enjoyed alone : they rush to some companion to 
declare this discovery of something that is majestic, 
comely, or tender ; they say, " Share me — let a 
friend's bosom feel the heart leap ; 'tis only half a 
rapture till it is all gone, all emptied into thy beauty 
and holiness, thou friend of my gladness and partner 
of my existence ! See, I decant my heart into thy 
hand — how precious it lies there in the place that 
framed it ; the nest has not grown cold." When I am 
best, I must drive home and let my ecstasy rush over 
the threshold into all the kindred arms, without a self- 
ish thought — not even to claim shelter : least of all, to 
beg for food when I am full already, and that is the 
reason why I have arrived. 

But when we say that God's sympathy with the 
jubilee or discontent of man's desires sets him to 
limit, to affect or modify his purposes, to correct what 
he is persuaded by the remarks we make to him must 
have been wrong, — in short, to supplement what is 



214 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

already perfectly contrived, and to receive as advice 
the prayers which nothing but that perfection ever 
could have suggested, we turn the relation between 
the finite and infinite into dickering. The Guinea 
traders advance towards a group of natives, lay down 
their heap of trinkets and merchandize, and then 
retire : the natives advance, and put opposite to it a 
heap which they esteem equivalent. If the trader's 
estimate is the same, the exchange is made : otherwise 
the heaps are modified till the balance is reached. 
"How will you swap?" says man: " wilt thou be 
pleased to approach and examine my heap, glittering 
with gems or tears?" Heaven approaches to say: 
u Your heap was grown on my soil — I have nothing 
better to offer — will you bring spices to the tropics ? 
I recognize them, and proffer the greeting of their 
own nature." 

A father and mother love the tender homage of 
their children's feelings, but still ordain what is best, 
because they perceive what imperfectness there would 
be in yielding to ill-considered desires, however eager, 
and winged with filial impetuosity. There is satis- 
faction when the desires harmonize with the parental 
intent ; but when they do not there is a serene regard 
that is not affected by this state of filial unresponsive- 
ness. The well-considered desire is but the reflection 
of the well-premeditated purpose, whether it be for 
evident good or seeming evil. There is no praying 
possible to a man until he becomes again enough of a 
child not to calculate his raptures and not to crave an 
equivalent. As the child meets nobly the eyes of his 
father, in which many winters have garnered their 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 215 

sorrows, many summers have expressed their fruit, so 
the simple-minded man can exchange glances with 
the God who is quartered on his dwelling, and return 
smile for smile. 

How often we lift ourselves heavenward with 
almost a perfect and a pure desire, and almost find 
ourselves standing on that sky-line which our highest 
earth projects. But there is some indefinite sense of 
being not yet quite in earnest, that is to say, not yet 
well grown. We have not fearlessly cut all the cords 
and let the gifts all loose. We almost reach, but 
there is still somewhere an anchor in the depth that 
forbids us to swing into perfect freedom. We linger 
painfully with our real self not yet entirely buoyant 
w r ithin us. Are we ready to cut loose for ever, and 
trust ourselves up through that unexplored depth? 
How it tempts and draws us, but how a single anchor 
holds us moored ! Just when we think that our desire 
is whole-souled enough to carry us away to hear 
heaven say, Yes, because we say it, a dull conscious- 
ness of flesh comes creeping up and clinging ; we 
settle back into immaturity. Perfect prayers without 
a spot or blemish, though not one word be spoken, 
and no phrases known to mankind be tampered with, 
always pluck the heart out of the earth, and move 
it softly, like a censer, to and fro beneath the face of 
heaven. 

But what is the use of this natural desiring? Set 
aside the conventional prayers, mere useless gesticu- 
lating and cerebral trickery, the bales of rhetoric 
which the churches dispatch to a country altogether 
foreign ; put aside every mannerism that denies the 



2l6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

perfect order of the physical and moral world, the 
perfect prescience of that order, and that the best 
thing must at any rate always happen, with or with- 
out human desiring, — what is the use of letting all the 
gifts run into this conspiracy of feeling, to gather with 
sword-clashing and acclaim around a door where the 
invisible is listening? There is no use at all, on the 
old theory that we can transact business with God, 
chaffer with him, beat him down, work upon his 
feelings. We can get a salad without growing it, just 
for the asking, as soon as we can get sanctities. Mr. 
Beecher well says that " prayer is often an argument 
of laziness. A person finds that his temper is a source 
of great trouble to him, so he says : ' Lord, my tem- 
per gives me a vast deal of inconvenience, and it 
would not be so great a task for you to correct it as 
for me. Will you please take it in hand through the 
influences of your Holy Spirit? ' " He that sitteth in the 
heavens shall laugh. " Do as I do ; grow your own 
salads, in the sweat of your brow, and your own sanc- 
tities in the blood of your heart." There is not a 
crevice along the line of this decree of labor, where 
a man may pry with his pickaxe of begging. 

What is the use, then, of natural desiring?- That 
is not the real question which the universal instinct 
suggests to us. This is the question : How can 
you help having the prayers of natural and sponta- 
neous feeling? Not a word need pass. Suppose 
earnestness does not fall on its knees and break into 
speech : if there be real earnestness, that is the 
prayer, because it is the sincere human endeavor to 
fulfil a gift, a task, a purpose, an inspiration. It is a 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 2l>] 

religious tendency of the finite towards the infinite, 
since it is by human earnestness that the work of God 
goes on. 

When a boy first sees the ocean at its orgy among 
the shore-rocks, he careers more lustily than the whole 
deep, more mobile than its waves, and shouts his 
irrepressible sympathy with freedom. The sea waited 
to be well fitted with that voice. It is ascription of 
praise even if the boy bandys school-yard vernacular 
with the solemn sky. When perfect music drives its 
golden scythe-chariot up the fine nerves, across the 
bridge of association, through the stern portcullis of 
care, and alights in the heart of a man, there is ado- 
ration, whether he faints with excess of recognition 
of one long absent, and lies prostrate in the arms 
of rhythm, feeling that he is not worthy it should 
come under his roof, or whether he mounts the seat 
and grasps the thrilling reins ; God's unity is riding 
through his distraction, brought by that team of all 
the instruments which shake their manes across the 
pavement of his bosom, and strike out the sparks of 
longing. He cannot help knowing that his visitor 
anticipates a harmony to which he has not yet attained. 
No matter whether he calls it perfect Beauty or per- 
fect God, whether it prostrates or enraptures him ; 
his soul cannot avoid making some gesture ; it is con- 
sent to heaven, and a declaration of love. 

It is not different with any moment when our powers 
are heaped up towards some attraction. Shall the 
waters which follow the moon protest, " What is the 
use of this?" Their movement declares, "We cannot 
help it." The name of God, and a flash of recogni- 

10 



2l8 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

tion that passes between earth and heaven, sums up 
our sincerity, whether it reaches freedom in arts, 
service, suffering, or simple natural joy. In Mrs. 
Gaskell's novel of " Mary Barton," Job Legh says : 
" It's not often I pray regular, though I often speak a 
word to God, when I'm either very happy or very 
sorry. Fve catched myself thanking him at odd hours, 
when I've found a rare insect, or had a fine day for 
an out : but I cannot help it, no more than I can talk- 
ing to a friend." And Jean Paul Richter, waking 
from a hideous dream, in the sun and air of a genial 
morning, says : " My soul wept for joy that I could 
still pray to God ; and the joy and the weeping and 
the faith on him were my prayer." He had nothing 
to ask for, but every thing to bestow. What is the 
use of it? What is the use of thirds or fifths in har- 
mony? The vibrations do not undertake to have 
commercial intercourse ; their mutual benefit is in the 
law of their affinity, and the air breathes the marriage 
that consoles a world. 

The young prince gets into a castle which he does 
not know belongs to him already by the foreordination 
of love. Having but one search to make, and the 
search itself being the entreaty he has to frame, he 
passes through the mercenary groups ; scullions may 
work for wages, and remain always scullions ; the 
men-at-arms for booty ; the chaplain coins his prayers 
into board and lodging, even Gold-Stick in Waiting is 
not inaccessible to bribes. Everybody recommends 
his knack, prays for it, craves consideration of the 
supreme Beauty. But the youth has mounted at 
length past all these landing-places, a suitor accepted 



FALSE AND TRUE PRAYING. 2 1 9 

before he reaches the chamber of avowal, where he 
wakes the blandishment which is the counterpart of 
his enterprise. 

So when the instinct of human life struggles ob- 
scurely upward to its various achievements, it takes 
divine nature along with it, comes into the light, sees 
its face, and says, " Is it thou, my God? " 



IX. 

STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 

MR. Darwin's theory that all the varieties of ani- 
mal and vegetable life have been due to some 
principle of natural selection, working by means of a 
struggle to maintain life, has lately been reenforced 
by him with a theory that every line of inheritance is 
endowed with indestructible germs, some of which 
lie latent while others become expressed in character, 
but all of them are liable to come to the surface and 
announce themselves. A human family is a vehicle 
for these atoms, which assert themselves or retire into 
privacy as time goes on ; so that each generation not 
only inherits directly from the one preceding it, but is 
likely to reproduce some long forgotten traits of an- 
cestors, even to peculiarities of birth-mark, features 
and complexions. 

This recurrence of family marks has been noticed 
from the earliest times. Plutarch mentions them in 
an essay of his Morals, and relates a contemporaneous 
case of the youngest son of a certain Pytho, of an 
ancient Spartan line, who was born with the mark of 
a spear upon his body, which was the family mark, 
but had not reappeared for several generations ; it 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 221 

came at length, as if to guarantee purity of descent. 
So, says Plutarch, early generations of a family may 
keep latent some qualities and affections, or hold 
them slurred, which afterwards break forth and dis- 
play the natural tendency to some vice or virtue. 
This is Nature's entail. She brings a child into an 
old gallery of family portraits and startles it with its 
own identity upon the wall, of some one who is 
reputed to be dead and buried for a hundred years, 
but who acquires in this child a fresh lease of exist- 
ence. This occurs because the family germs are car- 
ried along by all the members, and propagated for 
years in silence and oblivion to bide their time. Vices 
and virtues thus leap to the face and into action, by 
this law of their own, and the individual is already 
decided upon before his birth. In this shuffling and 
cutting of the cards, the trumps that turn up are not 
always honors. But no individual in the whole series 
possessed any choice in this vitalizing of the family 
germs. They wait for favoring conditions. " In the 
thickest pine-wood," says Thoreau, " you will com- 
monly detect many little oaks, birches, and other hard 
woods, which are overshadowed and choked by the 
pines. When the pines are cleared off, the oaks, hav- 
ing got just the start they want and secured favorable 
conditions, immediately spring up to trees." Farmers 
used to wonder, when they burnt off a tract, to see a 
new growth without any planting take possession of 
the soil. But we now understand that the old growth 
merely discouraged the forms that were already on 
the spot and languishing for chances. So, every 
member of Mr. Darwin's family possesses all the 



2 23 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

heir-looms : but no individual in the whole long series 
can ever account for his fancy to furnish his new 
house with them. The feudal brigands who called 
themselves barons while they were levying toll on 
their domains, appear afterward at the Old Bailey 
under the style and title of highway-robber, and are 
comfortably hung by proxy. Felony or piety may 
skip a generation or two because the ground is occu- 
pied by some other alternation of germs, but they are 
sure to reappear. All our senses are detectives ; and 
a dead ancestor is liable to arrest in the person of his 
descendant. 

The Chinese, in connection with their worship of 
ancestors, have the practice of conferring rank and 
dignity, not only upon the person who extorts it by 
some great service, but upon the whole line of his dead 
ancestors. The title does not pass to his descendants, 
for they must also earn distinction. It works back- 
wardly against the stream, for each ancestor has been 
the parent of a man's excellence, by transmitting un- 
consciously the atoms of nobility ; so the title puts 
into each port and deposits a part of its return cargo. 
The ancestor was like a bale of goods in which rare 
seeds of the tropics get transported to new soil. Or, 
he reminds us of the bird that flies with a crop-full 
of cherry-stones, and enriches with them a pasture 
where boulders were the previous sowing. 

This theory of indestructible seeds lurking in every- 
body's physical frame, which serves Mr. Darwin to 
favor his idea of natural transmissibility of traits, 
threatens to do us a mischief in the moral direction. 
We are obliged to accept it, or some modification of 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 223 

it, if we would account for the facts of inheritance. 
They are too plain to be missed. Lunacy lies dormant 
and pacified through groups of charming children, 
to creep at last from its burrow and climb to the eyes 
of one : then, a look that has been dead for years 
" revisits the glimpses of the moon." A mother can- 
not bear to knit, but she has a child who knits pre- 
cisely in the style of its grandmother. Lady Frances 
Howard had a mother who taught her to be " unspeak- 
ably venal and impure." The gifts of her person 
were as rare as the deficiencies of her soul. She 
married Robert Carr, an empty-headed favorite of 
King James ; but there was her previous husband to 
get rid of; also a friend of his to murder. Divorce 
and poison legitimated their secret profligacy with a 
marriage. A blue-eyed girl was born to them while 
they lay in the Tower, under the charge of murder. 
Escaping justice, they buried themselves in the ob- 
scurity of the country, to rear, amid mutual reproaches 
and a godless life, the daughter, who became one of 
England's purest women, and the mother of Lord 
William Russell, who died for resistance to royal priv- 
ilege. Does God 

" set such pure aniens to hideous deeds? 

Why not? He overblows an ugly grave 
With violets which blossom in the spring." 

Such daughters are really born long before their father 
and mother come into the world. 

It is not necessary for an old family to preserve the 
law of primogeniture, or the habit of exclusive con- 
nections. There is another law that keeps record of 






224 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

virtues and vices though the page be scored with 
intermarriages. The manuscript is a palimpsest : 
whatever writing w T ent to it is underneath, and Nature's 
sense finds means of being read. 

But what effect does this begin to have upon our 
feeling of moral accountability ? In one direction it 
has a good effect, to show us that Nature insists upon 
better methods of dealing with criminals and all the 
exceptional victims of excesses. It would have a bad 
effect if it encouraged average men and women to put 
up too easily with their imperfections. If medical 
jurisprudence should ever become scientific enough to 
prevent a jury from procuring a man to be hung, who 
had been expressly born to repeat the propensity and 
the act of murder, it would not justify a juryman in 
watering his sperm-oil or making a false invoice as 
soon as the trial is over. If a single glass of liquor 
can inflame the arson in a man w T ho began burning as 
soon as he knew enough to light a match, it ought to 
stimulate a court to provide treatment more medicinal 
and restorative than a perpetual prison ; but the judge 
would be none the less accountable if he took a bribe 
or perverted judgment to soothe some popular opin- 
ion. 

It is very clear that there are exceptional cases in 
whom the sense of moral accountability is as low as 
the capacity for resistance to temptation. One is the 
measure of the other. The divine mind claims through 
them that they shall be exempted from our contempt, 
and treated with restoration instead of punishment. 
Just as a case like Laura Bridgman's is a hint to Dr. 
Howe that, if the blind, the deaf and dumb, would 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 225 

eventually possess ideas and be put in communication 
with mankind, a patience that cannot tire, and an in- 
vention that baffles the closest lock of the senses, and 
picks them open, must be exercised. There is a 
moral disability as deep as this that appeals to courts 
for the justice of remedy instead of penalty. And it 
is for science to instruct the bench, by putting into 
every case of moral malformation testimony as to its 
responsibility : for men who are not born to be hung 
are actually hung for having been born. Nothing but 
the strictest science can save us here from the two sins 
of sentimentalism and cruelty. 

But it is plain, in the mean time, that the exceptions 
are candidates for asylums and not for cells : shut up, 
already, in an organization that crowds in upon their 
life, like the old dungeons whose moveable walls les- 
sened the prisoner's air daily, to crush the body flat at 
last. Do you think these moral prisoners are uncon- 
scious that they first saw the light in prison, first 
knew their own brain as their gaoler, and pressed 
their soul against the senses, like a piteous face that 
clings to a grated window? God has not left these 
without a taste for the liberty that streams into them 
from every well-born face ; they have glimpses of that 
domain of smiles, good women, and stray breaths from 
the boundless firmament of manhood. They know 
best the woe of their inheritance : nothing but drink 
ever does or can blunt their feeling of inferiority, and 
lend flushes of mad triumph to their overt acts. To 
believe otherwise would be to suspect God of indiffer- 
ence to his maimed and helpless children : their dis- 
couragement i§ his pity pleading at the bar of all our 

IQ* 



226 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

courts to have his own decree overruled, and his 
poor prisoners remanded into love. 

Does it follow, then, that clerks who have a salary 
of $1560 should manage to spend four times that sum, 
upon pleasures that breed moral disability within 
them, that the trustee shall exculpate himself for spec- 
ulating in the stocks of widows and orphans, that the 
gold gambler shall strip them to adorn his little game, 
that the shopkeeper shall lie about his goods, that a 
man who has congested his brain by habitual drinking, 
till his judgment is impaired and his impulses brutal- 
ized, can take a shot at any man whom he imagines 
to have wronged him, and be acquitted on the score of 
his congestion, that every insolence shall pasture upon 
the indiscretions and confidences of mankind? The 
first move of your detected sharper would be to allege 
irresistible circumstances, like those which commend 
a starving mother to our pity, and bid us extenuate her 
theft. Her hunger gnawed herself and children double, 
till they looked over a grave's edge. Perhaps it was 
dug by generations of poverty. His hunger was its 
own ancestor. The Chinaman would execrate him 
directly, and not look critically back into his line. 

There are, then, exceptions created by birth, and 
exceptions which spring from overpowering circum- 
stances. All of them are appeals to us to discover the 
sanitary method appropriate to every case : so that a 
man who is congenitally mischievous need not be 
punished because the court does not pronounce him 
to be a malicious idiot, and consign him to a poor- 
house. God has already made more delicate distinc- 
tions. 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRV. 227 

Exceptional cases must be put aside, however, when 
we treat of the moral dignity of the average man. 
How clear it is that they spontaneously refer themselves 
to a class outside of the average accountability of man- 
kind. We should shake bitter fruit from Mr. Darwin's 
family- tree if it bore excuse and subterfuge. And 
what are his constant germs, after all, but a device of 
the Creator to propagate a moral strife and elect it to 
be the parent of symmetry? If moral evil recurred 
with every father and mother, the people would become 
brothers of the gorilla without the trouble of descend- 
ing from him. And if moral innocence had been 
stereotyped in every heart, there would have been by 
this time a nursery containing about 900,000,000 babes. 
Science cannot prove all germs too constant for our 
purpose, which is to maintain that personal freedom 
and accountability have a definite per cent of advantage 
over inheritance, so as to modify the character of the 
majority. 

Long before Mr. Darwin wrote, mankind tortured 
itself with questions of the relation of its acts to the 
power and foreknowledge of God. Its instinct that 
some traits were invariable made it reason thus : "If 
God foreknows all that I shall do, it must be because I 
have a tendency to do those things, and no others : it 
is intended or predestined that I shall do them ; it was 
seen in the very beginning how finite beings would 
conduct themselves. The world and the soul were 
both made in such a Way that the things which have 
been done must have been done, and all the things 
which I shall do I must do, otherwise they would not 
be done ; how, then, can I appear to myself to be free 



228 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

to do as I please, to follow evil or to abstain from it, 
as I please : if I do not abstain from evil, is it because 
my evil was predestined, and if it was, how can I feel 
that I am morally accountable ? " 

When this question, with help from Scripture, comes 
up to embarrass us, there is sometimes a disposition to 
avoid it by supposing that many different things might 
have happened in the world from those that did hap- 
pen, that men might have been more virtuous and 
have made greater progress. The object is to shift the 
responsibility from the perfection of God to the imper- 
fect volition of man. But we perceive that this shift- 
ing will not change the nature of the question : for we 
must still refer to some cause the fact that man has 
been so created that he acts imperfectly, no matter 
whether from choice or necessity ; his acts must have 
motives and causes, and they must be in his organiza- 
tion, and that must be traced back to the organizer. 
I have always thought that the various ways of dis- 
cussing this interesting question have only been so many 
ways for avoiding the point of it, either to clear God from 
blame or man ; that is, to make man supreme at the 
expense of God's freedom and accountability, or God 
supreme at the expense of man's. Whereas, if the an- 
swer to the question does not leave God supremely 
foreknowing and foreplanning, and man sufficiently 
free and accountable-, the question has not been an- 
swered at all : because we know that we are called 
upon to perform certain acts, and we know that the 
divine mind must have foreseen whether we shall or 
can perform them or not. 

Without stopping to rake into the terrible dust-heap 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 229 

of metaphysics which has accumulated around this 
burrow where human speculation has been working, 
let us try to find some plain and rational account of 
our relation to God's foreplanning. Then, in the first 
place, does it ever occur to us why we raise these 
questions ? Why do we desire to consider ourselves 
free and accountable beings, and why do we shrink 
from the idea that every good and evil act has been 
precalculated and predetermined? A man has a great 
advantage here, who does not believe in the originally 
depraved condition of the human soul, but who be- 
lieves, not only that man is designed to acquire good- 
ness, but that his original tendency is good, that the 
worst child of the worst parents, born and nurtured 
under the most infamous circumstances, is not totally 
depraved. If we believed that the evil in our nature 
counterbalanced the good, we could not find any rea- 
son for desiring to be free and accountable beings. 
We should no more be troubled with any ideas upon 
that point, than a cotton-gin is troubled to account for 
the fact that it is not an electro-magnetic battery. If 
we tended by nature in the main towards evil, we should 
be machines, and the question of our moral freedom 
would be indeed settled beforehand, predetermined 
against us, arranged from the beginning against virtue 
and in the interest of vice. There would be no reluc- 
tance to believe that good and evil are both the me- 
chanical products of divine foreknowledge. But we 
do shrink from that belief, and we prefer freedom : we 
welcome responsibility for our errors ; there is rejoic- 
ing in the dignity of remorse and shame ; we greet the 
accusations that convince us that our conscience is 



23O AMERICAN RELIGION. 

emancipating us when it tells us that we are bound. 
What a proof of our moral freedom it is ! We have a 
voice that is capable of telling us that we are the slaves 
of a bad habit. If this slavery were predestined it would 
be unavoidable. What, then, would be the value of 
the voice ? It would be only insult added to the injury 
of our depravity : an ever-rankling rebuke of some- 
thing too mechanical to deserve rebuke. 

How is the voice of conscience possible if it had not 
been predetermined that we should act conscientiously 
and purely? See, the very words we use, having the 
flavor of righteousness in them, are unaccountable if 
we are not free to choose between the evil and the 
good. Look at all the words which we use in speak- 
ing of moral action, and the feelings that belong to 
them. They grow out of the kindly soil of a nature 
that is destined for goodness ; like all other words, 
representing truths and facts, they are invented by the 
soul out of its own substance, and pass into circulation 
without raising the least suspicion of their genuineness. 
I would like to ask how a man who believes in any 
orthodox scheme of depravity would account, on simple 
terms of natural development, for the mere existence 
of the beautiful moral words that express the holiness 
of hearts, and of the other words by which we mark our 
sense of its opposite. Where do the phrases " a hate- 
ful crime," " an ugly disposition," " a mean and 
grovelling nature," come from ? If we grovelled by 
nature, we should not defame our nature by inventing 
these disagreeable epithets. Would an implement 
that is made to inflict pain and to spread destruction 
all around vilify itself, find fault with its original in- 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 23 1 

tention? Its acts are its words, and they simply ex- 
press a calculated mechanism. But our words of 
opprobrium find fault with ourselves and with our 
neighbors ; they arrest our course, they bring us up to 
the bar of opinion and of judgment. They are sug- 
gested by a universal sense of what is beautiful and of 
good report, and are the police of a soul that desires 
to live in order and never to draw down upon itself 
their bitter ministrations. 

If it were not for the light of the sun, we should not 
have the contrast and opposite of midnight. It is in 
the very act of flooding the universe with sunshine 
that the central orb marks its position by a multitude 
of shadows. They are fleeting, but the light continues ; 
dense, obstinate, uncomfortable as they are, the mighty 
parent of gladness and morning betrays its existence 
and marks its motion by their dusky fringes. They 
mark it but they cannot stay. Their quarters are con- 
tinually beaten up by the advance of daylight, and 
their existence is a continual decamping. So the 
words of our moral aversion mark the supremacy of 
an inner light. 

But, on the other hand, the words of our moral ap- 
proval must describe our real nature, as it was prede- 
termined, for in this respect they are like all the words 
representing the qualities that prevail in the natural 
world. For instance, take the qualities of motion, as 
they are illustrated by the stone that leaves the boy's 
sling, or the planet that was hurled with a similar 
force from the centre of divine origination. What is 
the prevailing quality of motion? Not crookedness, 
not stiffness, not a snarled irregularity. These are 



232 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

phrases which spring from our observation that the 
great movements of the world are straight, or circular, 
or spiral, or meandering, or descriptive of all the beau- 
tiful sections of a cone. These are gracious and ac- 
ceptable words, pleasing to the inner sense of harmony 
and proportion which we inherit from the Mind that 
made the world. Whenever we observe a movement 
in some limited space that is wanting in the beautiful 
and easy sweep of all the great movements which 
keep worlds turning, leaves springing from a stalk, and 
gems from a centre, we apply language to it that 
marks our sense of its discrepancy. When we say it 
is crooked, we brand it with our feeling that crooked- 
ness does not prevail throughout the works of God. 
The notion would not be possible if our mind were not 
preoccupied by the idea that symmetry prevails. The 
exceptions are the shadows that bound the light, and 
are constantly decamping at its approach. A feeling 
of this, which is kindred to a feeling of moral propor- 
tion, still exists among people whose intelligence is 
sunk in barbarism. In the lines of their canoes and 
the curves of their paddles they have to conform to the 
motions of winds and waves ; and they weave up with 
the gestures of their dances the refined swayings of the 
stars that perform their measures through the sky. 

What a wonderful instrument to be invented by the 
savages, that stand the lowest in the scale of human 
intelligence, is the boomerang of the Australian. It is 
based upon an instinctive sense of the beautiful and 
accurate motions which all bodies must make when 
they pass through a resisting medium. As it darts 
afar, then glides upward like a bird, and turning back- 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 233 

ward seeks the hand that threw it ; or, dipping and 
rising, stretches out by a long curve to pass the corner 
of a wood or the brow of a hill to strike its object, it 
imitates the ellipses of the sky. The air resists the 
freedom of the weapon, which, in overcoming, in as- 
serting itself, in carrying out its natural efficiency, 
finds that what limits its freedom endows it with grace. 
The savage teaches us that Nature is everywhere on 
such good terms with Nature, that the apparent quar- 
rel is only a healthy wrestling between two friends. 
The man says to the angel : "I will not let thee go 
except thou bless me." The sweep of the boomerang 
brings back to us from the original design, that is just 
out of sight, our positive and pleasant words. 

Then our moral freedom must consist in our per- 
sonal vindication of the original design against all the 
exceptions and the apparent contradictions. Our finite 
life is thrown directly into the midst of these, on pur- 
pose that our souls, by resisting them, may learn to 
share the original freedom. It is put into us, with all 
its seeds, to be developed into vital conformity with a 
primitive intention. If we lived, upon the great scale, 
an infinite life, that should comprehend all the real 
motions and forces of the universe, we should not be 
troubled with the exceptions, they would not be so 
styled by us, and the word contradiction would be 
as impossible to us as it is to God. But we live, upon 
the little scale, a finite life : the moral freedom that is 
destined for a wider life learns its first lesson close to 
the earth and thrust into a body ; on every hand 
comes resistance to develop its free and beautiful 
movements ; the insignificant bit of road that we 



234 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

travel with so much fighting and privation seems a 
stunted and a distorted bit, until we discover that it is 
part of the long sweep of the freedom that makes our 
souls a divine endowment. 

It is resistance that decides the beginning of every 
graceful line. If it were not for that, we should 
neither know that we had freedom or were capable 
of developing it. Put before every human being his 
choice, perplexed as he is and often desperate among 
the obstacles to his moral welfare, between respon- 
sibility for all his actions and irresponsibility, and 
he will be eager to claim, before God, the privilege of 
being held accountable for all his depravity. Before 
man, he will extenuate and excuse, to win opinion, or 
escape from it. But, notwithstanding his repeated 
failures, and the sense of shame they kindle in him, 
he is in no hurry to get any consolation or immunity 
from any doctrine that destroys his moral freedom. 
We all cling to that : it came down with the rest of 
our birthright. And it is the common sense which 
prevents all the theological jugglery about free-will 
and foreknowledge from troubling our mind. 

We are created with a preference for the perfection 
which we have not reached. That is God's fore- 
knowledge in our case. He knows that we will fall 
into vices, but that we prefer goodness ; and that will 
eventually, either here or elsewhere, vindicate his 
plan. He secured in advance the moral complexion 
of every one of us for the remainder of this year. As 
an astronomer will calculate to a second the arrival of 
the earth's shadow upon the moon's disc, he might 
calculate, if he cared for superfluous knowledge, the 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 235 

moment when a temptation will touch the soul to 
overspread it. He might calculate, too, that with the 
moment of its departure there will recur the prefer- 
ence of the soul for light. The eclipse is not the law 
of the soul, but one of the circumstances of its career 
that makes the light more precious and adorable than 
ever. We should not feel the chill, nor be conscious 
of the dusk, if the law of our soul were not a hunger 
for light. We are free to hunger for it. 

This hunger is the expression of the moral attain- 
ment possible to each individual, and cannot be the 
same in all, because the structure is not the same. 
But it announces the moral function that is possible to 
each. And all freedom must of course be relative to 
the amount of this latent possibility. 

As exercise, however, develops this function, it 
enables it to crave more satisfaction, just as the mus- 
cular system, trained by labor and expanded to the 
limits of each one's capability of growing muscle, 
demands a greater variety and amount of food. If it 
receives this increase it is kept in its highest normal 
condition. And as in this way impaired states and 
defects of the muscular system can be overcome, so 
moral exercise can do a great deal to obviate inherited 
disinclination to perform much moral service, can 
resist tricks, and modify the characters of the struc- 
ture. But freedom is individual, and cannot transcend 
the possibilities of the structure. It is none the less 
absolute, so far as each man is concerned, and not 
removed from his private control. He is free to 
hunger for it. There is our answer to those heaps of 
metaphysics, tons upon tons of dust, that have accu- 



236 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

mulated about this question. It is the answer of God 
through the voice of our human preference. 

If any one is disposed to say that we might have 
been created spotless, and incapable of spot, I an- 
swer, then we should have been incapable of moral 
freedom. The very pith of freedom is, to choose if 
you fail, and to choose till you succeed in modifying 
the sources of failure. A perfectly regulated and 
infallible human temper, clock-work skilfully adjusted 
in the beginning, and warranted to run upon being 
wound up, is the nature of an automaton. Such a 
human being would be devoid of every emotion, igno- 
rant of the bliss of working to save its personality from 
the conflict of circumstances. We prefer to find cause 
for laughter and for tears, to feel the heart leap when 
the soul sounds its trumpet of warning, to have our 
nerves swept like a harp by circumstances, even though 
the strings bend to cracking. When, after many trials, 
a manly character learns to draw sweet and firm vibra- 
tions from them, and every thing around us that has 
waited for the right note to be sounded wakes up 
responsive, and full-blooded harmony fills all the air, 
we begin to see and to glory in the divine purpose. 
For we are so framed that the repose and dead infalli- 
bility of a machine is hateful to us. If, by giving up 
a portion of our moral freedom, we could be spared a 
few tears of anguish, is there a man who would not 
cling to his freedom, and prize the tears of his own 
remorse as drops that heaven adopts with its iris, bid 
them run, and bid his freedom see its own vindica- 
tion? We long to wake up more fully to the glory of 
finding ourselves in peril, compelled to fight for our 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 237 

position, rallied, in the face of serious opposition, to 
support our preference for God, to taste the sweet joy 
of finding that we are equal to this warfare, and that 
God has not set us growing like a shapely tree, or 
bending heavily with unearned fragrance and fruit : 
he has snatched our roots from an inanimate soil, and 
here we are floating wide in the perils that force sym- 
metry upon us. 

In summer strolls upon the broad beaches where 
the ocean runs by your side, the symbol of your moral- 
insecurity, you have picked up the symbol of your 
moral symmetry. It is nothing but a shell : " frail, 
but a work divine," because its delicate outline has 
been forced upon it by the restless motions of the ele- 
ment in which it lived. That external curve, that 
spiral of successive growths, has ■ been built by the 
curves of the brine itself: it represents the rhythm of 
danger ; the little tenant has unconsciously secreted its 
house all around it in lines that correspond to the 
lines that threaten its frailness ; in hardening, they 
express the very motions of the forces that are inces- 
santly tossing and worrying about it, and they assume 
the only shape that can shed these forces in safety. And 
the curve grows solid while the waves remain fluid ; 
so that you pick up what reminds you of a beautiful 
character, whose lines are moulded in correspondence 
to its perils. The souls that are thrown into this 
ocean of moral freedom grow in the grace which at 
once describes and repels its uncertainties. 

Your child puts his ear to the shell's smooth lips that 
are purple with the speech of victory, and listens, fancy- 
ing that the sound of the sea still lingers in its handi- 



238 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

work. But the sound is in his own ear, and might 
say to him that his heart is a deep not yet disturbed 
enough to fashion and complete his beauty. How 
long it will be, too, before he understands that he 
secretes the walls of his building from a material that 
is furnished by his apparent enemy ! 

What should we say would be the effect upon man's 
character if the natural elements, such as electricity, 
magnetism, vapor, had no difficulties for his manage- 
ment : if he could strangle them in his cradle ; if God 
made them over to us in traces and martingale, trained 
not to shy nor kick, their uses understood by instinct, 
their properties discovered without the expense of a 
single accident, not a hurt to life or limb, no hazard 
in applying them to the purposes of our material life ; 
if every flaw in a* boiler were respected, every break 
in the lightning-rod jumped by the deferential fluid, 
every failure to make a weld in moulding shafts or 
cannon let pass without an accident, every compres- 
sion of vapor kept within a destructive expansibility, — 
bad air at the bottom of a well, and gases that rush 
out behind the miner's pickaxe, harmless as daylight ; 
a box of nitro-glycerine, by just throwing at another 
person's head, turned into a poultice for his pimple ! 
Why should we not whine about the catastrophes that 
arise in dealing with the elements as well as about 
the perils of our moral freedom? The God who cre- 
ated the elements to be our ministers foreknew and 
predestined all the tricks they play upon our ignor- 
ance. He might have made us impenetrable to their 
blind furies, so that we could study them in safety, 
harness them to our team, as a boy ties a string to his 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 239 

rocking-horse and exults in the imagination of his 
fiery gallop. Fortunately not: for instead of being 
boys with rocking-horses, we desire to be men clothed 
in the thunder we have tamed, and carrying weapons 
which our own tears quenched and tempered into 
steel. Dominion over Nature, discovery of her secrets, 
application of her powers, is not done by babes who 
smile in their fatuous sleep upon the mother's breast. 
They are safe from harm there, but they are also far 
removed from manhood, mere lumps of contingent 
humanity, alive as long as they are held. Men are 
not afraid to drive the team of physical catastrophes ; 
they are freighted with knowledge and power. You 
cannot conceive of any other way to get control of 
elements except by personal experience of their liabil- 
ities ; no other way, unless you are the God who made 
them. If they were a gift to us, and came by instinct, 
we should not be the men who could use them. Vir- 
tue itself that comes by instinct uses the man who 
inherits it, and is only the advertisement of a previous 
freedom. The law of freedom is, that peril and ad- 
vantage walk hand in hand. What sister-angels on 
the threshold of earth ! Defying each other in har- 
mony, repelling each other's glances till they melt 
into a look of concurrence, so that man is no sooner 
alarmed than he is attracted, and he sees that it is God 
himself who has divided himself thus that his will 
may be done. 

Experience seems to furnish us with the deduction 
that His will partly is to create and to fund great 
crowds of veteran souls, who have discovered what 
justice is in conflict with injustice ; who have not 



24O AMERICAN RELIGION. 

learned righteousness by rote, nor imbibed sincerity 
as a flower draws sap or a babe takes milk : souls 
who have not been content with an instinct for good- 
ness, but have hazarded their life, and put their moral 
freedom on the venture to make it positively known 
and lived by them ; souls covered with the scars that 
victory healed but was too proud to obliterate. We 
indulge an expectation that these souls, accountable 
for every vice, but predestined to prefer the nature of 
God, are recruited into other armies to maintain the 
purpose of freedom upon other fields. As my glance 
falls by night through the depths of a clear sky, where 
the stars attract like virtues not yet reached, a sugges- 
tion comes to me that God has other fields, and beyond 
the utmost verge of vision and imagination work still 
for moral freedom to perform, glories for accountable 
beings to gather, and new illustrations of foreplanning. 
If so, the sky is not too deep for souls who learn to 
swim, and the ocean of this earth's moral danger is 
large enough for our training. 

Does it seem to us that, after all, there might have 
been a better way ? Perhaps we hate evil so sincerely 
that we shrink from deliberately showing that God 
made it an element of moral freedom. Perhaps our 
lucky temperament never had to contest a single point, 
and cannot imagine this style of optimism. But I ask, 
Is it not so ? — was it not foreknown that it would be 
so ? How then could there have been a better way ? 
We must believe that a perfect Mind takes the best 
way to bring its children towards its own perfection. 
When we begin to wonder if there might not have 
been better ways, do we not see that we begin to cast 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 



24I 



imputations upon one of the best ideas we have, 
namely, that the divine intelligence is all-perfect and 
all-wise? Every circumstance connected with our 
physical and moral life must go to that idea for its 
interpretation ; because there is no other idea in the 
soul, so centrally situated, so constantly prevailing, so 
distinctly to be made out as latent in its primeval sub- 
stance. One can hardly have patience to hear the 
supposition that the power of God did not select the 
shortest and the swiftest road to its purpose ; that evil 
is a mistake, a misfortune, an afterthought of fallen 
man ; that death and sin came by the weakness of 
man instead of by the unshakable consistency of God ; 
that God is now trying to repair an oversight, or to 
neutralize the unfortunate uses that man made of his 
freedom ; that the earth has got away from God far- 
ther than he expected that it would, farther than is 
consistent with his absolute perfection. I see in all 
things absolute perfection ; that I see at all is proof 
to me that I see in the best way, and that moral 
freedom is not clear from vice is proof to me that 
vice is essential to moral freedom. Else why is it 
here, whence came it, whither does it tend? If I 
cannot answer such questions so as to accept all the 
facts, I deny God as flatly as the man does who denies 
that God exists at all ; because I set up some of the 
facts as being inconsistent with the nature of a God. 

It ought to be the aim of our intelligence to see 
what facts there are in this universe, especially those 
which touch our character most nearly, to call them 
by their right names, and to hold all „of them up to 
the divine honor. All of them. There is a plant 



242 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

called Hyosciamus falezlez, that grows in the Sahara 
It kills in a few hours the horse, the ass, the dog and 
man, but will fatten camels, goats and sheep. Noth- 
ing can be without its uses : from the poison lurking 
in the herb which a sheep can eat though it kills a 
man, to that element which, by threatening man's 
moral freedom, makes him so much better than a 
sheep, and such a monument of the infinite foresight. 
And here we are maintaining the great problem. 
How can we account for a moral argument that could 
not have been held by the man who was contemporary 
with the mastodon, though he had wit enough to slay 
the creature? Such strife as his rude weapons inau- 
gurated has scattered hospitals and churches all over 
the surfaces where primitive passions browsed and 
raged in the shape of animals. One after another 
huge blustering becomes extinct, or is huddled into 
obscure places, just as the old animality still lurks in 
each man's cerebellum. But when you count the cen- 
turies of culture, you mark the successive terraces 
whence strife receded and left the land to symmetry. 
It is like the effort of mankind to build a ship. The 
first dwellers upon coasts ventured out to fish a little 
in a vehicle like a feeding-trough, burned and hacked 
without taste out of the trunk of a tree. Men began 
in this way to learn what motions water makes, and 
what form best answered to the exigencies of the 
winds, currents and billows. It was a constant fight 
to match peril with a cutwater : and the old, half 
hollowed trunk, with both ends as blunt as the sense 
of the builders^ passed through all the stages of con- 
test, represented by the Japanese junk, the Phenician 



STRIFE AND SYMMETRY. 243 

galley, the Roman trireme, pirogue and catamaran of 
the South-Seas, balsa of the Peruvians, caique of the 
Turk, and kayak of the Esquimaux, till flocks of 
ships hide it within their graceful lines, and are shep- 
herded by willing winds into all the seas of ample 
maintenance. In the deep hold of this symmetry which 
has been extorted from centuries of foul weather, the 
mild civilizations of mankind pass safely to and fro, 
and traffic in ideas, charities, and beauties. The first 
savage who struggled with nature is still inside the 
last soul made ; but he is so enveloped in buoyant and 
sea-worthy curves that he rides on the bulk of danger- 
ous problems, weathers the lee shores, and swings to 
in the harbor of his moral freedom. 



X. 

A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 

SOME of the Fakirs, or reputed saints of India, 
make a point of standing upon one foot for such 
a length of time that they succeed in being incapable 
of putting the other foot to the ground. Or they sit 
in some constrained posture until all natural gestures 
and motions become impossible. In other words, 
they share that notion of religion which makes it con- 
sist in some isolated actions, some separation from 
the general health and usefulness of human kind. 
The result of it is always some kind of shrivelling and 
maiming. A Dervish who occupies both his hands 
with holding up one foot while he goes hopping on 
the other, and repeats, " There is no God but God ! " 
is a very fair specimen of the sentimentalism that 
takes God out of the powers he has created, and puts 
him into excessive gifts or tendencies that earn our 
phrases of commendation. Of what consequence is 
the venerable nature of the phrase ? One of the safest 
things a man can say is, that there is no God but God ; 
but he cannot be understood to allude to that Person 
who has created two feet for religion to stand upon, if, 
while he says it, he struggles to make one foot suffice. 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 



H5 



And heaven must scorn the humility which we tele- 
graph thither by genuflection ; it must prefer the man- 
liness that stands by all created gifts, and looks itself 
in the face without pretence of worship. God is all 
the time premeditating the hands and feet, the senses 
of the body, the procreating and divining brain : in the 
pleasure of each function he " renews his ancient 
rapture." 

Suppose we say that God was in divine men recon- 
ciling the world to himself. It is very true, until we 
isolate the phrase from the rest of mankind, and break 
oft" the continuous incoming of some force into all our 
truth, our hopes, and our love. The infinite is in its 
great men by virtue of its eternal longing towards 
mankind, to become incarnate in them, and to acquire 
some emphasis for the moral law. And whatever we 
may think of separate men, it is certain that mankind 
is full of grace and truth. The great names that stand 
for the happy organizations along whose lips the 
divine breath played its sweet and solemn harmonies, 
stand also for the whole of organized humanity : all 
lips are ranged conveniently, and the visiting breath 
extorts their half and quarter notes. What harmony 
the whole obedience of a generation must procure ! 
The Being who extends beyond its limits is alone in a 
position to detect and enjoy its majestic fulness, as of 
the music which Pythagoras said the planets made 
by the ratio of their bulk and movements through the 
vibrating ether : the inhabitants of the planets are part 
of the movement, and cannot overhear it. 

Yet, sometimes, when human affairs have accumu- 
lated into a moment of intense interest, there is a hush, 



246 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

or mood of expectation, just before the crisis, during 
which men become conscious of the exalted condition 
of their powers : they hear the consent of many con- 
sciences, they feel that they are harmonizing with a 
lofty will. After the wind has been blowing off shore 
for some time there is a lull, just before a change of 
the wind from seaward. In that lull, the mustering 
waves lift up their innumerable voice. Careless stroll- 
ers on the beach drop their spoil of sea-stray, and the 
breath of the consenting anthem freshens them with 
iwe. 

A few years ago the American people overheard 
the thunder of their own awakening, as the moral law, 
which had been beaten down so long by the hostility 
of slavery, had gathered in too many hearts to be 
repressed any longer. The States seemed clustered 
in the sweet and firm gradation of the pipes for a Pan 
to touch, with lips that gathered a great purpose, as a 
note went up from each to frame the accord which at 
the time we called our Patriotism, as we listened to 
the unexpected sound ; but it was the climax of an 
inspiration, a possession of the conscience by its own 
law, a rapture of the consent of millions to their own 
likeness with divine indignation and justice. The 
moral law had been painfully struggling to touch this 
land for a generation : many bleeding hands had been 
lifted from the surf to grapple with points of advant- 
age ; their efforts were God's own pertinacity ; lashed 
along by the stress of his presence, they were caught 
by the undertow and swept backward all the time, till 
suddenly, what seemed drowning became rescue and 
safety, and we climbed from the iron-bound coast to 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 247 

the meadows where the amaranths grew for our he- 
roes. Foreign observers who were lounging curiously 
up and down along the edge of our whitening pur- 
pose dropped their trifles, and hailed the " uprising of 
a great people " as they termed it ; our whole history 
culminating to speak in the first rash gun that struck 
all consciences with the same force, and set them 
vibrating into unity. 

But it makes a great difference whether we say that 
God invented the moral sense, put it into a world of 
good and evil, so organized as to be attracted by the 
one and repelled by the other instinctively, without 
any farther complicity of the divine mind, or whether 
we make that Mind in some way the participant of 
the sense thus invented, and therefore its perpetual, 
guarantee. A moral sense is not merely a contrivance 
for detecting and holding on to goodness, like the ma- 
chines which reject dirt and foreign objects and pass 
the proper staple through. But personal sympathy is 
the life of it. Approbation and disapprobation are the 
personal feelings that justify and inspire its sense of 
right and wrong. And as one human conscience 
seeks the alliance of another, thus doubling the strength 
which it shares by fraternity, can the infinite Con- 
science be content, after having made our moral sense 
of such a temper, to forego the delights of personal 
sympathy ? And it cannot be only a delight, such as a 
great artist takes in observing the exquisite and infal- 
lible adaptation to some result of something he has 
made : must it not be cooperation also, personal com- 
plicity, the longing of an infinite Person to enjoy his 
own emphasis in the thing that he loved to make, to 



248 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

continue its companion, to profit by its activity ? The 
very pith of the business of inventing consciences was 
to secure a right of passage into all times and places 
where spirit conflicts with matter, and good with evil. 
Was there an intelligible purpose in ordaining such a 
conflict, and was there love as well as wisdom in the 
purpose? Into what remoteness, then, has that love 
vanished, into what a chilling and heartless withdrawal, 
if mankind, after becoming compromised to suffer for 
that purpose, is left discountenanced. Each genera- 
tion, instead of being a column led to battle, and offi- 
cered, cheered, organized clear through to victory, with 
its inspiring soul in every movement, would be a 
crowd of men abandoned by its general after he has 
betrayed it into an ambush, where its instincts may 
fight through or perish. 

Of all our gifts, the conscience is the most sensible 
to the divine immanence : it has such faith to welcome, 
such faith to detest, such an instinct to set things right, 
such sensitiveness to unhealthy influences, such joy in 
plain-dealing, such pain when duplicity is near. What 
witness is there, so perpetual, to the closeness of God ? 
It is heaven's challenging outpost, furnished with the 
only countersign. Does it impair our belief in this to 
remember that we have often been without any con- 
sciousness that something universal would fain conspire 
with us, and that we have passed through flat and 
dreary periods when a single kindling moment would 
have been to us like the sight of a palm-tree to a 
caravan. There is no gift of our intelligence that is 
always full of blood ; no channel to the soul that is 
always spilling over. The divine force retreats from 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 



2 49 



the yellow fields of autumn, and does not keep up a 
perpetual harvesting : but the soil in which the faded 
stubble is left disconsolately standing is filled with 
the elements that make it liable to be visited. Con- 
straint loosens its hold of every seed in the returning 
sun. This appears to be the method of divine activity 
in our structure ; not an inflammation of all the facul- 
ties at once, nor a continual extolling of any one of 
them. They are the world's opportunities. 

When you escape to the sea-side from the drowsy 
August heats, the flat brown rocks tempt you down to 
caress the lip of the retiring tide ; it seems to offer 
itself while it is really withdrawing. And the recesses 
underneath the cliffs are left bare ; the tawny bunches 
of weed no longer sway and sparkle, they hang dry 
and dispirited. All the sea-creatures have lost their 
vivacity, and retreat out of sight into the darkest and 
dampest places, underneath low ledges where you can 
only surmise that they exist. They no longer taste 
the brine. But it soon creeps landward again, not 
having forgotten its favorite inlets, nor the forms of life 
that take toll of it to get through the day with. Inch 
by inch, as if hardly effectual to slide up so far and 
wet its old mark again, it gains upon you, freshens 
pool after pool full of humble suitors, till at length 
your heart feels every tentacle that is out of sight lifting 
to breathe : you know that the anemone repaints its 
orange, and the hermit-crab scuttles forth to surprise 
another meal. So the nourishment of spiritual gifts is 
constantly renewed : they cannot hide so as not to be 
visited, they cannot languish so long as to become 
impaired. 



250 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

But we must not be deceived by all the notable in- 
stances of the uprisings of a popular conscience, and 
conclude that God reserves his high tides for these. 
Our consciences are not merely his opportunities for 
heaping up great critical moments of history, and con- 
centrating moral virtue against disease and threatened 
dissolution. Historical purposes rose in a great wave 
that took Athens on its crest and dashed it against the 
Persian barbarism, to keep that from violating a hearth 
at which civilization and the arts might warm them- 
selves. When the wave subsided, every conscience 
was like the pools left between rocks, where life goes 
on. And the subsequent development of morality, 
which preserved all the common practical truths of 
the conscience, till they rose to a high tide in Socrates, 
was just as liable to be visited and freshened by the 
diurnal presence, and just as dependent upon it, as the 
great moments, when hearts by running together and 
surprising each other's excellence take fire with en- 
thusiasm. When this country lifted against slavery, 
there were no more consciences in it than before, but 
they suddenly conspired ; if the ordinary life was in- 
proved, it was from the contagion of this successful 
feeling : it freshened all the gifts, and all the men and 
women held a nobler and a purer tone with each other. 
Charity became more self-forgetful, forlorn hopes were 
recruited to victories ; so regenerating is fraternity. 
But the supreme Thought has not retreated from that 
page of our history to meditate in some seclusion 
another that shall shine as fair. Our sense of yea and 
nay lies all open to it unprotected ; the humblest soul 
who strives to be honest in his dealings, and wakes in 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 251 

the morning to nothing more brilliant than care, noth- 
ing more hazardous than some temptation, quite out 
of the way, never to be mentioned, hardly obtrusive 
enough to secure an epitaph at last, belongs to the 
history of his time because his conscience belongs to 
God. 

.This keeps a country capable of inspiration, liable 
to swell into great moments that are mentioned by the 
voice of trumpets : this level of the divine presence 
that is like the circulation of the blood. We are told 
that when an orator has mounted into his best periods 
with all his audience, his brain is filled with blood and 
fits tight against the arches of the head. When it 
shrinks again, it is with the loss of not a single drop, 
and the heart's regular function maintains his oppor- 
tunities. Let it seem a venerable and sacred thought 
to us, that our structure preserves, as God pleases, 
from day to day, our ordinary pity, love, and indigna- 
tion, our sympathy with truths and causes, our dis- 
position to defend the right, and stand by the oppressed, 
our friendships and our genuine affinities. This is 
our real citizenship of the republic, this preponderance 
of health in the general conscience. What is it but a 
desire to anticipate the depravities that make heroic 
remedies necessary, — the loss of blood and tears, the 
wear and tear of gentle sensibilities, the distrust that 
puts on file the terrible expense and criticises Provi- 
dence. It is the greatest effort of divine in-being that 
keeps the general sentiment effective, and our ordinary 
days void of offence. We cannot strike a more fatal 
blow against religion than to favor a theory that great 
moments, shining gifts, peculiar men, exclusive truths, 



252 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

uncommon feelings, announce that the Person has 
drawn near, and selects some flesh for incarnation. All 
the great elements of man, like air, light, magnetism, 
are the most constant and the most diffused. Neighbor- 
hoods live upon the general pity, toleration, sense of 
responsibility to laws. What do we gain by placing 
so much emphasis on isolated things? We remove 
them from the benefit of the common sunshine. There 
are fish that have accommodated themselves to living 
in the Mammoth Cave, and in the sublime recesses of 
the Styrian Alps. But they have paid for their ex- 
clusiveness by the loss of sight. The same species 
that live in waters visited by the unobtrusive bounty 
of the daylight preserve the faculty of vision. And if 
we ever think that it sharpens our eye to hold it against 
an aperture where the light seems concentrated, we 
shall discover too late that it has been dulled for the 
great horizon of the sky. The focus is so bright that 
the optic nerve is paralyzed. The very form of the 
eye corresponds to the concave that is filled from brim 
to brim with the even day. 

A display of power may seem to be great because 
it is all in one direction. The lightning cuts a narrow 
channel of white heat, and with its whole resistless 
force disappears through a small hole seldom bigger 
than a pea. The diffused sunshine holds, as in solu- 
tion, light and heat, and spills all over the rim of the 
planet. It is hardly noticed because its great elements 
are subdued into harmony with the eye, and but little 
transcend its optic qualities. But that great harmony 
feeds the broadness of a universe. 

I supposed that the moral sense was not merely a 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 253 

contrivance for detecting and holding on to goodness, 
but that the divine sympathy must repair to it. But 
I suggest whether that does not follow some law, in 
order not to oppress and displace our moral freedom. 
Does God find it necessary to be minutely curious 
about our private thoughts and actions ? May it not 
appear to Him that the health and development of 
the conscience are best consulted by a regard for the 
reserve in which all finite thought must have its birth? 
The conscience can do its own watching, and chron- 
icle its own condition. It is heaven's moral repre- 
sentative on earth, and is furnished with the eternal 
prescriptions. Every time that a heavenly purpose 
breathes across these laws of our nature, they are 
reinvigorated. Something responds to our best mo- 
ments ; and there is refreshment, confidence, joy in 
the response. No asking can bring it ; nothing but 
the excellence itself. All the sincere and burning 
hours of the spirit seem to drop and be lost from this 
effulgence. Thus He descends to us, thus He rests 
upon our highest points ; there the cloud breaks with 
voice and lightning, and the drops collect in the old 
channels, and hurry down towards the commonest 
details .and the earthliest places of our life. But 
having thus drifted upon our mountain top, and parted 
with this influence, He leaves the flooded conscience 
to trickle into the street, the work-shop, the kitchen, the 
wood-shed and factory, to deposit the precious wash- 
ings of an inaccessible sphere. Thus, long after 
heaven has passed x>n above us our life is all saturated 
with its gifts. 

Do we consider seriously enough what it is that 



254 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

we carry about with us in this self-registering power 
of conscience ? Indeed, every faculty of the mind is a 
cell where gradual increase is hived up, either from 
sweet or poisonous flowers that are found as we range 
over the whole expanse of life. Heaven loves the 
human sweetness that is stored away for emergencies, 
but is it curious about the little flights and circles 
which we make in gathering it? So conscience, or 
the instinct for the true, the healthy, and the heavenly, 
guides our wanderings, calls every faculty off from 
base pursuits, tries to reject what hurts us, and recom- 
mends what will make us, soul and body, a sweet 
savor. And it records the results, without the inter- 
vention of higher powers ; it is infallible, it can make 
no mistakes, whether we are awake to this or not. 
You have seen the tell-tales, which are furnished to 
various machines for travelling, creating motive- 
power, or elaborating products : all the operations 
may proceed unconsciously from stage to stage, yet, 
however complicated, at the end of the journey the 
register yields infallible returns. Our own souls are 
the final exhibit which we make to heaven. God 
sees us, and sees the whole career, and comprehends 
at once its most insignificant details, — thoughts the 
most fleeting, motives the most private, desires that 
were abandoned or pursued, — when we bring Him 
our quality, the total result of living. All. the drudgery 
is in it, but sifted, as the miner sifts the silt of moun- 
tain streams : God knows where the gold came from 
as it lies heavy in his hand. Sometimes the whole 
soul swings loose from house-keeping, shopkeeping, 
pleading, bargaining, ditching and draining, and goes 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 255 

straight off towards the invisible, as though the earth 
should leave its orbit from love of the sun. Perhaps 
not one of our petty gestures has attracted heaven's 
attention, but it bends to the coining of a whole soul, 
and kisses its kindred. 

Consider what a dreadful power this is of self-ac- 
cumulation. It lays up within us vileness as well as 
grace. In moments of temptation we say, No eye sees 
me. In the secrecy of our thinking we imagine that 
the body is a screen. But although God must be in- 
different to omniscience, in a minute and trivial sense, 
we are the betrayers ; we are recorders of every pulse 
and breath. Can a single drop of blood evade the 
heart? Can a single vibration help transmitting itself 
to the atmosphere ? Lift your hand with reverence 
to your head, and say, Whatever transpires beneath 
this roof is beyond annihilation, can never be recalled ; 
whatever flies through these windows flies not back 
again. Shut out the moth and rust, and fling wide 
open only to clear mornings and a perfect heaven. 

This intuitive capacity of ordinary men, and its lia- 
bility to be visited, is threatened with contempt in a 
country where men estimate each other so largely by 
their power to succeed in various undertakings. The 
shrewdness might detect itself turning a cold shoulder 
to the innocence. The savage is not dispossessed and 
driven to the wall of the Rocky Mountains : he walks 
in Broadway, daubs on the war-paint of caucuses and 
delivers their whoop, and follows every trail that leads 
from Wall Street into plunder. He is a man of busi- 
ness, and, if you do not excite him, he maybe gathered 
to his fathers guiltless of eating the hearts of his vie- 



256 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

tims. But if the jaundice of the gold-room infect his 
blood, and cast a sickly glare of yellowness over the 
landscape, he will no longer distinguish the natural- 
hue of honor. 

A German has written a fantastic story about a 
whimsical old gentleman, who, in contempt for the 
cutaneous virtue of fashionable life, palmed off in 
society a highly-civilized chimpanzee as his son-in-law. 
Every thing went well enough, in spite of some minor 
reminiscences of the jungle, till a little temptation, too 
suggestive of the home of his youth and the fresh feel- 
ings of his unsophisticated years, tore off the skilfully- 
adjusted mask, and nothing of the man was left except 
the properties that had been supplied by the tailor. 
A whole street-full of gamblers have thus been noticed 
suddenly to strip off twenty thousand years and become 
naked vindications of Mr. Darwin's origin of Man. 

When the spangles on a garment compensate for the 
mire through which it was dragged ; when success just- 
ifies its own cheating ; when the blood wrung out of 
somebody drips from a vulgar escutcheon, and is never 
wiped away so long as the crest is high, its dragon 
or its vulture rampant, and the whole emblazonment 
fills the street, — the conscience slinks home by the 
alleys, and frets because it has lost its right of way. 
Its desert was to succeed, as well as the shiftiness that 
demoralizes everybody by its enormous gains. But 
this smart social system will pass into anarchy without 
an obscure sense of ours that integrity is the founder 
and preserver of States. We are needed. There is 
not a rill, wandering through quiet places, that does 
not eventually temper the bitter, stormy sea with its 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 257 

sweet waters. And, when a number of people will 
draw all the feeding-streams of their privacy from 
plain conscience, it gathers like the rolling of a great 
clear current down towards the ocean, into whose tur- 
bid brine it shoots with impetuosity, so that sea-faring 
men shall detect with surprise the sweetness of the 
hills, dividing and refusing to mingle with the tide. A 
man's soul may make a very faint mark, the volume 
which its activity propels may appear to be a ridicu- 
lous trickle, but, if it be clear and cool, the earth thirsts 
for it, the heavy sea is waiting to be well tempered by 
it, — all nature sighs for freshness, and lifts up its face 
to the hills whence comes its help. 

These blotches of half-barbarous society must be 
touched and arrested by our plain yea and nay. The 
aid we give is not measured by the insignificance of our 
mind, but by its singleness. What constructs the broad 
highway of solid light that paves ocean toward the 
rising or the setting sun ? The felicity of every single 
drop of the water in which a whole sun lies mirrored : 
minute, but illuminated, they lead towards the morn- 
ing, or suggest its return. What a laurel of glory is the 
thought that a very little person is so implicated in the 
success of his country's real truth, to hold it in a pure 
form, to keep it undisturbed by the passions that welter 
all around it, to fix one firm spot of fidelity and to stick 
by it; as if to say, u Though the whole earth go adrift, 
though double-dealing prosper and scorn me, though 
the darkness of barbarism invade all my neighborhood, 
covering cities and people as waters cover the sea's 
bottom, — here I stand, to hold my little trembling 
jewel and permit its slight ray to escape me ! ; So shines 



25S AMERICAN RELIGION. 

a good deed in a naughty world/ Come, friend and 
neighbor, and hold your jewel next to mine till the 
faint beam flashes ; perhaps a word will go forth, Let 
there be light I and these little spots of our fidelity 
shall melt together into the irrepressible radiance of a 
morning." 

When w r e feel the successive shocks which the em- 
bezzlers, defaulters, gamblers, over-reachers, give to 
the general confidence, they are hints to our neutrality 
that nothing will restore faith, blunt the forger's pen, 
break the tables where the dice of speculation play with 
our prosperity, — nothing, but a fresh issue of the con- 
science that is minted in a million innocencies. That 
is the true return to specie payment, and the arrest of 
evils which, we pretend, are tolerated by necessity. 

As a great action, performed by a few men under 
grievous disadvantages, takes root somewhere upon 
the soil of the planet, and after many generations vin- 
dicates the original trial, and illustrates the forlorn 
faith by appearing in forms of generous polities, in 
disfranchised conscience, in ameliorated conditions of 
the oppressed, so shall our little candle throw its beams 
as far as that. It is a great action to keep faith high 
and aggressive in a period when the people wink to 
each other applausive ly at hearing of an admirable 
intrigue, and relish the stories whose point is some 
successful artifice. It is a great struggle, — founders of 
States never equalled it, explorers of new worlds never 
went so far, — to be simple when duplicity and coarse- 
ness meet with toleration ; to preserve a few wants, a 
few plain habits, a few rational atid manly objects of 
enterprise, when cities go mad with show and guilty 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 259 

satisfactions. If a few drops of the poison find their 
way into a man's high vein, it is a great thing to resist, 
to purge the blood, to thrust back the whole terrible 
tendency, to wake, flinging the period off as a night- 
mare. This is the function of a Conscience for Truth. 

But Truth is not inclosed by the fragrant rose-hedges 
of innocence. They are planted, rather, as retreats 
for health upon its broad domain. Conscience is sen- 
sitive to the truths which decide a person's career, 
direct him towards charities and causes, foster his taste 
for being in a minority, reduce the articles of his the- 
ology till a pioneer's pack will lift them easily for a 
day's march, at the end of which he divides with his 
comrades rations of his love to man. Some critics 
profess that Dante has put the young man whom 
Jesus loved, but who turned away sorrowfully, into 
his. third canto, where he describes seeing the shade 
of him who from cowardice made the great refusal.* 
However that may be, it was a moment when con- 
science refused itself: the whole ardor of the Truth 
hung about the youth's neck, rushed to his possible 
attainment, loved its own generous implication of 
identity in him, longed to own his unsullied heart and 
turn more youth into the pure stream. Was ever a 
man so flattered? There is no man who is not so 
flattered. 

This quality of being loved and chosen never dies 
out of the most common or mercenary life. It is there, 
if the soul is there : it is liable to be summoned, it can 

* " E vidi Tombra di colui 
Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto." 

Inferno, III. 59, 60. 



260 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

be empanelled for the great trials of Truth. If the 
soul is not there, — in other words, if we suppose that 
habits can entirely eat away the columns of conscience 
and hope, and bring down the personality which they 
sustain into an irretrievable ruin, — then there may be 
nothing left to love ; but that is because there is noth- 
ing left to live. It is a sponging out of the thinking 
and emotional characters. Truth never offers con- 
scious love to the crystal or the clod. Whatever is 
once desired by the Creator must be always liable 
to desire, for it is the invitation of one who is not 
afflicted by the caprices of earthly love. It is as essen- 
tial that God's tendency to love us and desire us should 
be infinite as that his power should be, or his skill, or 
his justice. When animated nature, struggling up 
through its various degrees of intelligence, reaches a 
point where God, not content with propagating all the 
changeless types of animals, or with developing one 
type from another, shows a desire to recreate, to de- 
velop freedom out of matter, to reform intelligence, 
to lift it up to accountability, to bring out its latent 
truths, to love and long for its obedience, Nature has 
reached the point of a rational and personal man, 
whom God will no more suffer to slip from his infinite 
expectation of owning, of having the whole soul of, 
sooner or later, than he will suffer the rose to slip from 
his sense of beauty, the planet from his sense of order. 
And to the man who turns away sorrowfully or defi- 
antly, and makes the heart of his youth hard against 
the arrowy smile, the law of his structure will dispense 
as much pain, sooner or later, as will be salutary to 
break up his reserve. Can a finite being, by sinning, 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 261 

ever make himself impenetrable to an infinite being? 
The thought is inconceivable. We cannot use ordi- 
nary language, if we think so : all words that express 
the relations of created things to creating power are 
turned adrift, without a purpose. For such a theory 
of the universe a new language must be invented ; 
but it must be one that man cannot speak. For the 
breath of God in man gathers upon his lips in words 
of spontaneous reply to God's desire. 

What is the whole of our life but an appeal which 
Heaven makes to us for our cooperation with its pur- 
pose ? And what better way is there to discover what 
the purpose is, than to take notice of the appeals? 
Every being discovers his own object in life by taking 
heed to the solicitations which are made for his time, 
his gift, his influence, his physical or mental expendi- 
ture. Not by consulting bodies of divinity that pre- 
tend to explain God's objects in creating us, not by 
reading a class of books that are devoted to the narrow 
purpose of speaking well of God, making a catalogue 
of hrs attributes, or showing how Jesus manifested 
him, but by taking at first hand from God himself his 
orders, expressed to us as they are so explicitly in the 
next thing that we see must be done, whether we are 
charmed with the thing or not. But, in depending 
upon our cooperation, heaven has not forgotten to make 
something in its appeals to us attractive : if not the 
thing itself, then the sense of sacrificing attractiveness 
for its service ; the very dislike to do the thing has its 
attractions to a human soul. Its sorrowful turning 
away is an intimation to itself that something truly 
noble just looked at it in passing. 



262 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

We have not a season from youth to age that is not 
filled with these expressive hints that we belong to a 
spiritual order of creatures, and must do a spiritual 
work. But in youth, especially, when the immature 
mind is clamorous to find its proper growth in its 
appropriate employment, the soul is besieged as 
though it were the door at which some largess was 
dispensing : there is the turmoil and pressure of a 
crowd ; there is annoyance, uncertainty of claim. It 
is the greatness of the Infinite before these avenues 
that communicate with human life. Conditions of the 
body, temperaments, the disfavor of circumstances, 
sometimes increase the embarrassment to the point of 
mental distress, and worry of the conscience. But it 
is not long before the prominent suitor emerges from 
the crowd, and, pressing a claim that is well founded 
in our own nature, urges upon us our own adaptation, 
fixing us with a glance of personal love. Sometimes 
the soul finds its kindred purpose without hesitation, 
or a moment of internal pain, as in water face answers 
to face, and the work of life is cheerfully begun. No 
man is ever left so poor in opportunities of serving 
God that he does not see the face of some truth as it 
passes by his place of business and invites him out 
upon God's highway. It is some occasion for pri- 
vate, family devotedness, some unpopular cause, 
some scouted aspect of divine things, some call of 
the country and of humanity, — it is sincerity and 
personal surrender in some direction. It says, Take 
up that sword — lift up that cross — wield that pen — 
feed that mouth — close that wound — bind up that 
broken heart — pour that love out of the window — 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 263 

let that uncomfortable message through the door ; 
behold, I stand and knock ; the sound is harsh, but 
open, and see my handsome face, and bid me in with 
joy! 

What claim have we to be selected by Truth ? It is 
because it sees something in us that is akin to itself. 
It is the Infinite perceiving itself in the mirror of hu- 
man intelligence. What a spotless depth youth is to 
receive the reflection of that face ! Before a single 
gale of passion roughens and huddles all the features. 
Before egotism begins to look for its own face there, 
and is discontented at the intrusion of another and a 
mightier countenance that must and will look also, 
having no other surface upon which it can be seen. 
We are called because we can listen and comprehend 
the voice : we hear it as a straying child hears the 
mother's voice, that goes round through the bewilder- 
ment, groping and searching for the ears so well 
attuned by nature to thrill at the dear summons of 
deliverance. When your nearest of kin comes call- 
ing, you fling the closed casement open, and lean out 
with answering smile : and if fortunate vines cluster 
and blossom round your life, you break off the rose 
and throw it down, the gage of your fine challenge, 
then descend to meet it and redeem your pledge. 
Noble and uplifting moments of life, when imperish- 
able love solicits you, and some truth or duty within 
you breaks through all constraints and rushes into 
God's open day to claim affinity with truth ! Then is 
the moment to return love and to be loved, and to 
build the soul's life upon happiness for ever. 

How large a part of human pathos turns upon the 



264 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

common circumstance that the soul will not recognize 
its next of kin, rejects it, under the dominion of some 
prepossession, prefers some passing fancy, shrinks 
from the entire confidence and devotedness that it will 
have before it wholly loves ! This is history's contin- 
ual replacing upon the stage of old tragedies, by new 
ones drawn from the same old theme. To be a lost 
leader is bad : to desert a cause once embraced, how 
full of sorrow ! But to refuse when you are tempted 
by Truth, and to turn away sorrowfully, perhaps even 
coweringly, when some majestic look falls on you, to 
deny your own heart to the excellence of thinking or 
doing that pleads with it, and seeks to swallow up all 
its hesitation in avowal and plighted faith and bliss- 
ful surrender, to be startled at the sight of your soul's 
own blood mantling in the face of your soul's own 
truth that was yours from the foundation of the world, 
yours by divine fore-ordination, to be not brave enough 
even to try to bid your own independence, your own 
life's heroism welcome : afraid of it, and running to 
shelter, into a neighbor's tenement, into the arms of 
old opinions, into the comfortableness of old routines, 
glad to get out of the sky into a frame-house, — surely, 
there is sadness in this, and the scenes of your tragedy, 
though no man is spectator, and no pen records them, 
are burnt into your soul by the stamp of your sorrow, 
and may there be read at any time by God. 

And how different this tragedy is from that which the 
sons of God perform at the bidding of earnest expect- 
ation ! The whole creation groans and travails with 
that : but the pain in it is that kind which belongs to 
the waiting for some manifestation, not the kind which 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 265 

agonizes in dread of manifestation, in abject dislike 
of the tears which Truth must shed. As different as 
the tragedies of cowards are from the tragedies of 
brave men ; as different as the sneaking pallor of 
murder is from the blush of battle. There is a mo- 
ment in the career of every person when the choice is 
clearly given to him between the pain which kills and 
the pain which saves : he knows, once at least, that 
something loves him, and he can choose between the 
trial of following true love and the catastrophe of de- 
serting it. Every boy must come to this, rude, indiffer- 
ent, coarse-grained as he may seem to be, fit only for 
giving and receiving blows of fate : the handsome face 
of some occasion will transfix him. Every girl must 
come to this, however fleeting, shallow, and trivial her 
ways of life may be, herself prepossessed with unsub- 
stantial motives, beset with vanities, launching her 
hours, as one lets bubbles from a pipe, to mark the 
frail iris that the sun will paint for her ere they flatten. 
Manly, well-proportioned, exacting, thrilling Duty will 
claim her heart at last ; some face of Truth will point 
to its crown of thorns and woo her pity ; some bold 
eye, like a heaven full of daylight, will challenge her 
gaze till it droops in thankful acquiescence. There is 
the God within us, and the God without : they twain 
must become one flesh. Father and mother of the 
old life must be continually deserted for the marriages 
of the soul. 

How can we ever be really sure that something 
divine invites us ? It is important to consider if there be 
any way of distinguishing between one's conceit, one's 
prejudice, one's audacity, and a plain call to believe a 

12 



266 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

thing, to act a thing ; between one's timidity and a clear 
hint to avoid a thing. Our preferences for our own 
notions and habits may easily appear to us plain calls. 
Our conservative tendency to hold on to a mode of life, 
a style of faith, a way of thinking, is one of the most 
common things which deceive us. We suppose we are 
doing God's will when we do what we have done before. 
The duty which unsettles that, cannot -be of God, we 
think. Nothing is easier than to mistake our dread 
of society, our personal implication with dear friends 
and relatives, for a spiritual call to remain where we 
are, to think the old thoughts, to repeat the old phrase- 
ology of opinions into which we have grown comfort- 
ably, as into coats, to keep up the ordinary round that 
we have so often proved to be excellent and pleasant. 
And what disguises selfish calculation will borrow, so 
that our hankering for something will appear like a 
loving for something, particularly when all the grosser 
part of our nature is suborned to give false testimony 
on this point ; so that, for instance, our desire for 
admiration may appear like a real love for following 
something that gets this admiration, and things, good 
in themselves, may be bought by us, whole slave- 
coffles of them, and driven afield to raise for us con- 
sideration. How can the divine be distinguished from 
the common and unclean ! 

Every person is provided with his own test of this 
thing ; he can go into the gold-bearing regions of God 
and make his own assay. Can a miner go to Colo- 
rado and at once separate the ore from slag and refuse, 
and cannot the soul discern and reject the low sur- 
roundings of Truth ? Are the perishable senses more 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 267 

trustworthy than the immortal conscience? Has Truth 
been made lovable by us, and are we yet at a loss to 
know what truth to love ? The soul settles this matter 
for itself, sometimes with joy, sometimes with sor- 
row : both feelings testify that a competent judge is at 
hand. 

And see how simple the way is. Whatever looks 
on us and loves us does so by virtue of the kindred 
quality in ourselves. Then we may know that it is 
genuine by the way it pleads to be brought to our 
notice. And it is a pleading that offers disquiet rather 
than content, and invites us into a transitional state, 
where we often experience conflicting emotions, be- 
cause it is a transforming, regenerating love. It does 
not know what placidity is. It is a very exacting love, 
and wails unless it can have a whole, unmortgaged 
heart. It solicits us with the conscious pride of equal- 
ity. Your dog may be fed with bones beneath your 
table ; if you had a slave he might give you pleasure 
by his cringing : any common gratification may take 
the toll you throw ; but the sweet sternness of your 
wife overpowers you to give the freedom of your per- 
son into the keeping of a perfect freedom. We may 
know when it is the Truth that is waiting for us by 
the feeling of high kinship, and we see how different 
it is from a feeling of low acquaintanceship. The 
soul knows it in a breath. It can never mistake the 
irresistible attraction which comes to sweep our greater 
will away in spite of our petty wills ; for it is an 
invitation to the soul to fall into line with all the other 
worlds of God, and to sing the song of the morning 
stars in that great procession. 



268 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

We may distinguish reluctance to follow Truth from 
a dread lest we follow Error, in this, that the Truth 
draws while it seems to repel. The repulsion is only 
our own tardiness. The Truth was punctual : we 
were not quite up to time. If the thing that loves us 
be truly lovable, it penetrates our first alarms with a 
feeling of sublimity, such as arises in the presence of 
danger, and that which is excited by heroism putting 
itself in peril to serve some great purpose of rescue. 
There is always an element that tries the nerves, that 
takes away the breath, that bids the pulse bound wildly 
as the new task is assumed. This enlarges the whole 
organization ; more blood is made, more morbid 
muscle is repaired ; the gifts of the soul repay all its 
first tremors by expansion, and at last it serenely weds 
the Truth that seemed to court so roughly. It was 
only seeming : we were taken by surprise, we were 
not expecting to be so frankly summoned. And yet it 
is our own flesh and blood that opens this wooing 
with the words that startle : Let the dead bury the 
dead : leave all and follow me — the old house, the 
old lands, the old estate — I settle a hundred fold por- 
tion upon your fidelity. 

We may know that it is a truth which has got 
audience of us, and not our own conceits and preju- 
dices, when it dislodges us and sends us elsewhere, 
when we are detailed for duties, when our easy quar- 
ters are beaten up, and we have to rough it in the 
field, when we are selected for the forlorn hope, 
when we are ordered to the front. Pride of opinion, 
love of comfort, a desire to keep on good terms with 
our circle, these are never haunted with the enterprise 



A CONSCIENCE FOR TRUTH. 269 

to colonize a virgin soil and plant a flag there. But 
Truth, in every one of her stages, longs to leave some 
things behind : the truth of morals inspires us to 
abandon the old habitat of our vices, the truth of relig- 
ion drags us out of our doctrinal burrows to explore, 
to take possession. God cannot be exhausted. He 
has ever new things for new spirits, who become the 
most religious when they submit to this onward tend- 
ency, and break away in pursuit of the infinite mys- 
tery. It hails us in the van. Have you never heard 
its voice, paying men that most exquisite of flatteries, 
by asking for their hearts? We cannot conceal our 
satisfaction, but break into smiles and adoring gest- 
ures, and bend towards that invitation as the Earth 
towards its Sun. 



XL 

CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 

THE Ideal is not a phrase in high repute among 
practical people, who suspect it of excusing some 
immediate incapacity, like that which would recom- 
mend clouds to the selectmen for a new style of pave- 
ment, or a balloon's aimless whirling instead of some 
direct and planted way of locomotion. There may be an 
upper westward current ; but in the mean time the rail 
gets over the ground by all the points of the compass. 
The Ideal will possibly carry a person off by some 
aerial route to Paris ; but if he would return to Boston 
he must alight. This shrewdness is furthered, too, by 
the feeling that the phrase is chiefly the property of 
poets, who are exercised only in expression, and can- 
not be counted on for work. The influence which 
imaginative expression exerts upon a people is under- 
valued because it does not enrich the instant, but passes 
into the temperament by slow absorption, and appears 
at length in quality. Men cannot wait for that. There 
is work on hand that is to be done with what quality 
exists, or not at all. A man of business cannot see 
that the poem which he read over night affected, 
unless to perturb, his next day's operations. He will 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 271 

do better with his leisure next time by getting well 
posted from the commercial columns. He rises more 
buoyantly upon stocks : the pathos that wrings his 
heart is when they fall, and his streamers are no 
longer gaily afloat. The expression of music and art 
serves him only for enjoyment, and he has this advan- 
tage over the idealist that nobody can calculate the 
subtile orbit of influence, nor show how the song and 
symphony make blood. It is only by accident if one 
or two men in a generation have their heart or stomach 
so exposed that the physicians can observe its func- 
tion. But if every brain were unroofed, there is no 
Asmodeus skilled to detect tones and colors jostling its 
atoms into more spiritual companionship. One must 
be a part of the violin's grain to know how the vibra- 
tions of the strings record themselves in the dead 
wood of the instrument : not dead, indeed, if it is 
capable of assimilating rhythm. 

But there are two kinds of the Ideal : one tends 
toward expression, the other animates all kinds of 
labor, and secures results. When a practical man 
says that he can do without the Ideal, he does not 
understand his own business. When a prosaic moral- 
ist says the same, and takes a contract to reform or to 
establish, he throws up the material that he must work 
in. It is intangible, but has a pressure of so many 
pounds to the inch, and he stands drenched in it while 
he pretends he does not breathe. 

There is some ideal stimulus in every kind of work, 
none the less definite because the worker appears to 
be unconscious of it. A gang of men with sledge- 
hammers go fastening ties westward toward a Golden 



272 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Gate. There is expectation in every stroke : not a 
man of them but proposes to arrive somewhere by 
that track on which he is hammering. Family bread, 
affection, independence, enlargement : these invisible 
yearnings give the gold-glimmer to his Sacramento. 
He is an idealist while he is faithful to his work. And 
the country which hires his labor, and affects only to 
be wanting to reach the Pacific thereby, is stimulated 
by more than all the spices of the Orient. There is 
no such ideality on earth as that which compels a 
nation to expand all its powers of intelligence, and to 
reach eventually the Rights of Man. 

Something is to be overcome, wherever the ideal 
road is travelled. The effort may be stamped with 
the coarsest realism ; but the ideality is in the effort. 
We do not know the outlets of every thing that we 
perform, nor the subtile connection between our sim- 
plest acts and our loftiest attainments. It sometimes 
seems a great way from the body to the soul ; but a 
very slight deed may bridge over the abyss of that 
ocular deception. The soul is waiting close at hand 
to receive the benefit of our least integrity. So that 
very ordinary things may be the essentials to secure 
our spiritual advance : begrimed and sturdy engineers 
who rapidly pontoon for us a formidable-looking cur- 
rent, and let us transport our whole splendid equip- 
ment to the opposite shore. The Indian knows that a 
buffalo trail will take him surest to water. The Amer- 
ican condescends to follow the Indian, and his cities 
rise opposite to ferries and at the confluences of 
streams. Then at length the buffalo pilots thither the 
silent steps of Religion and Liberty. 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 273 

When Frederick the Great said he always noticed 
that Providence favored the heaviest battalion, he only 
stated in a sarcasm what God in history states relig- 
iously : that he is on the side of valor, foresight, self- 
control, wheresoever and an whatsoever objects these 
great qualities of an overcoming man are exercised. 
God, having no human pride, does not regard the 
nature of the object, but its intrinsic difficulties and 
its drift towards some beauty. An ideal object is one, 
however material, that gives the world a whole-souled 
man. And it is on this principle that natural forces 
seem to have selected their men and nations through 
the whole of history. It is the forecasting that moulds 
and reconstructs a raw popular material, till it is able 
to occupy, or to create, some important position, to 
assert a truth, to breast a flood of tyranny, to be caught 
in some way by the drift and amplitude of the divine 
order. If people have settled in spots towards which 
the streams of the past converge in order to find the 
outlet of civil and religious liberty, or if their ethical 
quality slowly selects spots that invite either the friend- 
ship or hostility of reigning ideas, and suggest rude 
engineering to arrange a battle-field, they are certain 
to be subjected to the training which shall best pre- 
pare them for their great effort. This training con- 
sists in overcoming something, no matter how physical, 
or how remote in character from the future issue. 

I know of nothing, for example, more striking, 
than the way in which the Dutch people were pre- 
pared to maintain liberty of thought and worship. 
A poor Frisian race was selected, and kept for cen- 
turies up to its knees in the marshes through which 

12* 



274 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

the Rhine emptied and lost itself. Here it lived in 
continual conflict with the Northern Ocean, forced 
literally to hold the tide at arm's length, while a few 
acres of dry land might yield a scanty subsistence. 
Here circumstance kept them, half submerged, till, 
instead of obeying a natural impulse to emigrate to 
solid and more congenial land, they acquired a liking 
for their amphibious position. The struggle piqued 
them into staying and seeing it out. For centuries 
they appeared to be doing nothing but building and 
repairing dykes, when really they were constructing a 
national will and persistency which was a dyke for 
tyranny to lash in vain. By keeping out the water 
they trained themselves to keep out the more insidi- 
ous tide of bigotry and spiritual death. What a 
homely and inglorious school for a great Republic, 
that taught her how to watch patiently by tending 
dykes and ditches, how to close a breach against ruin 
by standing with succor in the mid-tide when the 
sea-wall crumbled, how to convert almost continual 
defeat into victory, by keeping hold of a drowned 
position, cultivating acres that had just been drenched 
with salt, flowing back again upon depopulated dis- 
tricts and holding the old line against the sea ! All 
these stubborn traits appeared afterward clothed in 
noble forms of moral and mental life : still there was 
the old breakwater running through the national 
temper, and the Will of the people was like one of 
the ancestral Frisians, who could stand in a flood all 
day and not be chilled. The wisdom was vindicated 
which compelled them first to make a soil for ideal 
liberty to flourish in. A And as nations are prepared 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 275 

for great destinies, so are men : the constitution must 
catch free and vigorous movements in some mode of 
life fatal to indolence and vulgarity, the Will must be 
roused and learn how to handle the helm, no matter 
how rude the objects of the voyage are. 

The law upon which this principle rests is a very 
simple one. As you would never suspect the force 
of water till it breaks against something, so human 
volition and freedom never exist except in the act of 
overcoming. Before that moment they only remain 
as a condition of the mind which may be roused to 
action. What a difference between the sluggish level 
of a summer sea, with no more strength and depth, 
apparently, than to run up and lap the land, and the 
same surface when it seems to roll with a succession 
of deliberate, overpowering purposes, betraying what 
a depth it has to plough upon and yet not plough to 
the bottom, as it lifts and towers against some barrier 
put there to express its might ! In the act of striking, 
the graceful and voluptuous roll is changed to power. 
Without an obstacle for the growing billow to tend 
towards, it would pass unestimated across the surface. 
After once seeing how it can strike and shatter, the 
free wave has more weight to the observer. So a 
man has a great, silent, heaving element of volition, 
but it never develops energy till it touches something : 
then, if it singles out an obstacle to overcome, it carries 
the whole nature along against it. For the Will is the 
directing impulse of all the gifts and tendencies a man 
possesses ; every sweep of it is backed by the whole 
deep behind : when it strikes, action and reaction are 
developed, the whole nature is thrown into a healthy 



276 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

ferment, and every power is enlisted to make the 
overcoming power available. A man cannot come 
out of a real conflict without feeling an exhilaration 
of his whole mind and heart. He leaps all over, like a 
sea full of billows. He has asserted his individuality, 
and has become a man among men. So the thrill of 
exercise benefits the blood as well as the muscles, and 
the nerves as well as the blood. And, above all, the 
consciousness of one victory surprises all the powers 
into making attempts of their own to taste the same 
feeling of success. 

There is no real difference in all the labor which 
is performed between the moiling of the house- 
drudge up to the combining, choiring evolutions of 
the poet's brain. Constancy, everywhere the same, 
like the one nutritious principle in various kinds of 
food, is the element which makes all work substan- 
tially the same. And, like food itself, how work 
appears in an infinity of forms, on different surfaces, 
on different soils in the same surface, growing up into 
diverse colors. And yet in all the principle is identi- 
cal. As by chemistry we resolve every edible thing, 
from the root painfully torn up by the savage to the 
wheat that falls gracefully before the reaper, and the 
grape that is plucked with songs, into the same ele- 
ments of nourishment suited to the unvarying economy 
of the human frame : so we may suppose that all the 
labor of human hands and brains, from the stitching of 
the overworked and drooping seamstress up to the slow 
threading of the logician's thought, from the monoto- 
nous crack of the teamster's whip up to the telling 
succession of the orator's great periods, from the 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 277 

ends of the fingers to the heads of the nerves, is re- 
solved by the spiritual chemistry of the Creator into 
simplicity and elemental identity. 

The poets and men of expression have not, then, 
monopolized the Ideal. We must be poetical enough 
to detect it in the moral uses of the ordinary life we 
lead, that is so pathetic with the struggles of constancy 
against physical and mental circumstances. No 
matter how sensitive a young person's heart may be, 
like a bare nerve in the weather, flattered by the soft 
touch of music and colors, pared into gracious action 
by the chisel that builds the statue's symmetry, 
twitched by the finger of tragedy till the fount of tears 
is opened, — his ideal life does not begin till he turns 
away from these to take up his own instrument of 
work, to chip a conscience out of school-keeping, 
type-setting, engineering, cooking and house-work, to 
quarry some vital activity of a free people. Because 
he himself is to become a poem, fairer than any that 
was ever written, by overcoming indolence and a bad 
disposition, in favor of some immediate exigency. 
That is the story of his siege of Troy, his wandering 
of Ulysses, his Paradise regained. The ideal of his 
constancy is the moral sense which some personal 
deficiency or poverty inflames, till it becoms his pillar 
of fire in the wilderness. It does not shape him so 
much to remember the Odyssey, as it does to tie him- 
self to his own mast and sail past the Sirens ; or to go 
through Circe's den not only unsullied but a liberator of 
his comrades. When we see the course of Nature breed- 
ing in such schools its human genius, we may know 
how closely allied are conscience and superior talents 



278 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

Underneath the slow grinding suddenly a facet flashes. 
It is true you may grind at a sea-shore pebble till 
nothing comes of it but sand, but before you begin to 
grind all stones appear of similar texture. The real 
ideality is hid in this persevering against the most 
humiliating and prosaic conditions, such as the Cre- 
ator maintained through chaos and his scarcely less 
chaotic creatures of the early epochs. A million or 
two years of coarse persistency vanquish matter, and 
Shakspeare supplants the Saurian. Why should he 
not in every man and woman? for conscience can 
become Shakespearian underneath a hod of mortar 
that mounts round by round to top the house. Young 
people must learn that their creative and inspiring 
impulse is not derived from high Art, but from ac- 
commodation to low requirements in a high vein to 
make them serve, to extort from them such exquisite 
tones as the Russian did out of his bits of wood cut 
from different trees, till he converted the forest into 
a harmonicon ; and that other obscure inventor, who 
coaxed a heap of various stones to yield up its sepa- 
rate notes, and to fall into place in perfect octaves. 

All the manifoldness of modern labor appears, to 
the first superficial judgment, to be only setting the 
rich rim of earth with the jewels of cities, embossing 
it with the traits of human enterprise, and shaking 
out the white sails of intercourse on every water, that 
man's dexterity may pass from hand to hand, to equal- 
ize comfort and success. But these things are the 
dead Scripture of a divine Ideal ; they have no mean- 
ing until we perceive that human work is a means of 
human ennoblement, and that all products thus pass 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 279 

from hand to hand that souls may be equalized, and 
divine Providence cease to be a monopoly. 

It sometimes appears doubtful if we really appre- 
ciate this question. When I see the vulgar ambition 
of men who strive to better their condition by using 
labor of some kind merely to break their way into 
stock-jobbing, note-shaving, cotton-broking ; when the 
healthy farm is left for the dry and sultry pavement, 
where men's manhood goes up in steam and leaves their 
sub-soil barren ; when it appears to be the object to 
do the minimum of work for the maximum of comfort, 
and to join a well-clothed mob that goes wild with 
speculating, jobbing, lobbying, contracting, living by 
the wits, — a doubt comes over my mind if the young 
men understand the name, America. This is the 
meaning of that word which the rhetorician and the 
demagogue admire : Whatsoever thy hands find to do, 
do it with all thy might ! Not with thy meanness, 
nor with thy shiftiness, but with thy might, with thy 
whole soul, as the winds blow, as the sun shines, as 
the tide runs up a continent ; with all the native ele- 
ments of a free man, not with the adroitness of a 
juggler, to play tricks, and outwit everybody with 
such a superfluous appearance of sincerity. Find 
something to do, not something in the city to save 
the trouble of doing; find something that increases 
the values of the world, not something that merely 
plays with them a game of shuttlecock. To all this 
strenuous idleness which has demoralized our great 
cities, God repeats the ancient necessity : " Earn 
thy bread in the sweat of thy brow." We have a 
country while Liberty wears those glistening drops, 



280 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

seeing that earth is too poor to match, out of all her 
crown jewels, the native tiara of a Republic. But 
whoever lives in such a way as to make labor seem 
degrading, which he cannot do without stealing the 
labor of other men, prepares to betray Liberty, for he 
has already parted with his own. 

Why is it such a fatal thing when a country has 
men who throw discredit upon labor? Wherever a 
theory prevails that work is degrading, great mischief 
ensues : not because a false ambition withdraws need- 
ful hands from employments, for there are many kinds 
of work that demand diversities of gifts. If a man 
lays down one tool to take up another, he may still 
be faithful to the Commonwealth. And it is not be- 
cause men work badly who work under the contempt 
of their fellows, although there is no labor so ill done 
as that which is so meanly requited. But some kind 
of necessity — hunger, the climate, or the whip — will 
compel men to work in spite of human scorn : and 
the work will correspond to the necessity. In degrad- 
ing labor the mischief is done to mankind by degrad- 
ing Providence : it is a practical infidelity to the idea 
that God is a Creator. See how it operates. Work 
runs through the universe : it is the condition of per- 
manence and growth. Mankind is not retarded so 
much by inefficiency as by the arrogance that will not 
imitate God, for a certain per cent of inefficiency must 
always accompany so many births, being only another 
accident of malformation. But God, in prosecuting 
his divine schemes, allows for inefficiency but not for 
infidelity ; not for the arrogance that forgets it has 
been born, not for the ignorance that calls it an honor 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 281 

to do nothing. When one variety of work is thought 
degrading, all the other varieties become impaired. 
It is a revolt of the whole working organization against 
the order of the world. Intellect itself is betrayed 
when it is anxious to make it appear that no vulgar 
labors occupy it. It is trying to separate itself from 
the natural religion of mankind, and to pass off for 
something better than a laborer. What intellect God 
puts into the strokes of every day, as he thinks it not 
degrading to have his petroleum ready for the tap, 
his veins of coal and granite ready for the blaster's 
drill, his oak rimmed for keelsons with the hardness of 
a thousand years ! He puts slag into his iron, quartz 
into his gold, wildness and peril into his nursling 
whales, and rejoices to provoke our honest labor. 
There is not a stroke made by pen or pickaxe that is 
not in answer to the mind of God. He holds the 
most precious things beyond our arm's length, — gems, 
gold, beauty ; he worketh hitherto to make them, and 
we must work to win them, — diamonds in the river 
channel, pearls in the duskiness of Indian seas, liberty 
in every acre of the soil. How long His mind must 
brood before he can bring forests to lignite, and lignite 
to coal ; before the element of carbon will bleach 
and whiten into the Koh-i-noor, before the soil of a 
Republic can be transmuted into the Rights of Man ! 
This is all the industry of God, who knows that idle- 
ness is chaos, and an idle man the soul's disorganizes 
Wherever this tendency to undervalue labor exists, 
one service at least is performed, though no man may 
lift his finger, for it puts into a rough, symbolic shape 
the disease of reverie which infects smart people with 



282 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

the notion that their gift of sensibility, their claim to 
attainment, or conceit of superiority, is a fine and 
rather exclusive performance in the interest of an 
ideal impulse. Some people, thus afflicted, break 
into verse, mistaking their mood for a touch of the 
divine imagination, inflate their thin fabric, and look 
down upon the flatness of the world. Thus crudity, 
hysteria, and verbal facility sail airily over solid con- 
tinents of struggling merit, never to return. But 
plenty of friends distend this self-satisfaction with a 
belching flattery, so that continual relays of ft float 
jauntily above the silence of faithful souls. These 
aerial contrivances bear easily the weight of their con- 
trivers, and carry them into the endless circuit of the 
winds. 

It is worth considering how both self-satisfaction 
and self-distrust damage our best ideas, and let down 
our constancy to them. 

When Thorwaldsen had finished his remarkable 
statue of Christ, he was observed to be very sad ; and 
to a friend who asked the reason, he said : " My genius 
is decaying." " How so?" "My statue of Christ is 
the first of all my works that has satisfied me. Hither- 
to my idea has always far outrun my execution. But 
if now I am satisfied, I know I shall never have a 
great idea again." 

In the struggle for life and for moral promotion we 
arrive at certain points where our greatest danger 
threatens us. It is that of being content with arriving. 
Contests that result in our favor, combinations that 
humor us, moments when we baffle temperament and 
snatch a moral life, have a chance still left in favor of 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 283 

evil : that, namely, of demoralizing us by a feeling 
of satisfaction. There was an old general who made 
a successful landing of his troops upon a hostile shore : 
his first act before advancing was to burn the ships 
that brought him. A falling back was then no longer 
to be thought of. That is the way we ought to treat 
our attainments : sacrifice them to the necessity of 
victory, otherwise they only become the opportunities 
for declining the contest that impends. And a contest 
is always waiting in the front. To whatever spot we 
travel we find that we have only reached a place for 
discovering a necessity for travelling again, or of losing 
the advantages already gained. If a man could really 
come up abreast of his ideal, he would be no better 
off than the circumnavigators who reach the point 
from which they started. For to have no longer an 
ideal to pursue is the same as having never set out. 
So, fortunately, the spiritual life is not a succession of 
little horizons, whose surmises and expectations only 
delude us around to the place where first we lifted 
anchor. We shall never see that insipid calm again, 
nor be fastened to its buoys. 

We reach certain points of our spiritual develop- 
ment where the great danger threatens us of being 
too conscious that we have got so far, too content with 
it, less difficult to please than before, a little hurt by 
the obvious advantages we have gained. Hannibal 
overstaid his time after the battle of Cannae : his 
quartermasters, instead of getting ready rations for a 
march to Rome, were counting how many bushels of 
knight's rings had been stripped from the bodies 
of the slain ; and the common soldiers lost their disci- 



2S4 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

pline in months of high living. The best and most as- 
piring of people are apt to have their Plains of Capua, 
where they linger to make a luxury of their successes. 
Men who are in a condition to push on are the most 
demoralized by waiting. Soldiers say that the hard- 
est trial, next to that of continually falling back, is a 
check given to their instinct that a prime advantage 
has put them in prime order for an immediate ad- 
vance. Napoleon used to risk something on the 
strength of this instinctive confidence. 

Some of our most noted reveries of satisfaction and 
distrust look their worst when they are unflinchingly 
translated into the vernacular. This is a task which 
men sometimes undertake for themselves. But it is 
the nature of reverie to resolve action and thinking 
into mere nebulous possibility, to recur thus to a con- 
dition that precedes the formative and deciding Word. 
It is well to precipitate into words some of these 
vague moods of the best people. Here is one of 
them : u How well I have done ! I appear to have 
got over this fault ; I have checkmated my obtrusive 
temperament: it is so long since I gave way to it — 
so many weeks or months since the last fit of spleen, 
ill-temper, impure thinking, grudge of other people, 
envy of wealth, beauty or goodness. I have had a 
whole year of high-minded feeling ; it has been sig- 
nalized by a good many hours which I will claim con 
tained a consciousness of God. Yes, I have had 
some beautiful hours : stop, my soul, let us remember 
them, and recall together the dates and circumstances. 
I feel myself sinking into a delicious recurrence of 
past excellence : what summer afternoon ever brought 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 2S5 

me such repose, or lulled the senses and the mind into 
such harmony. It is midsummer's escape from ele- 
mental rages. u Now, if ever, are perfect days." 
Satisfied memory broods like a clear sky over my life. 
It puts an ear to my earth and tries if it be in tune. 

Whenever a man is fascinated by the coast on 
which he has landed, it is fortunate for him if his 
conscience, without hesitation, cries, " Burn your 
ships ! " The past is dead, all its actions have fallen 
off; they did duty, like leaves, for the season. If a 
man rakes his dead leaves together, it is a poor and 
thin compost that he makes. Pass on, the ground 
will soon be encumbered with them. Only boys like 
to hear them rustling, as they scud through on purpose 
to stir them up. Men are not made for such conceited 
reveries. Burn your ships, and let the impassable 
sea-line be your base. Plunge right into the ideal 
future, pursuing after pomp finer than any that you 
have overtaken, more sensibility for the divine pres- 
ence, more knowledge of its laws and satisfaction 
with them, more fraternity for man, which is divinity 
for God, — more prodigality of all the gifts, sending 
them out right and left, cool and bold, to beat up the 
thickets and forage for truth. 

Sometimes a mortified and discouraged person 
might recognize this plain speaking : u I can't get 
on. What force I have I bring to bear in the right 
direction, but the rails seem to be ice-coated, and I do 
not run. The bias towards a certain evil in me turns 
out to be strong enough to set my purpose of over- 
coming it at defiance. My ancestors have been too 
hard upon me : they lived first, and they lived fast. 



286 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

The emotions indulged by them gave a warp to the 
brain, a generation at a time, — so small as never to 
excite an active jealousy, and to leave a slim balance 
of regrets, — till here I am, at the end of the process, 
with a disposition slowly deposited, like a coral reef, 
against whose concrete my will is weak as water. 
My forefathers only paid the interest as it accrued : 
but they left the debt to me. Here I am, imprisoned 
with my better ideal in an organization that is scored 
by the fret of all the years. Who wonders when 
rocks upon the coast begin to crumble? The first 
billow found them as smooth as itself: but time, 
though never in a hurry, is always patient, and feels 
after its crack to work upon. By and by the cliff 
stands waist-deep in its own debris, and every kind of 
greediness can climb up and paste its impudent pla- 
card upon it. So that now I am read of all men to 
mean sloth, gluttony, conceit, concujoiscence. I stand 
for something in the line of self-indulgence, and my 
very face advertises what is to be had within." 

This also may be recognized : " I cannot keep my 
temper under slights and provocations that other men 
shed ; for I am boiled down and put up of several 
hundred considerable tempers, that were all well 
nourished in their day." May not this also find its 
counterpart : '■ What is my love for drink but the 
distillation of all the excellent liquor that my genial 
ancestors consumed in hospitable exigencies? They 
were slow to be affected : but I am at the end of the 
feast, and the drunkenness has just set in. The few 
years of my better tendencies have before them the 
task of undoing the work of two or three convivial 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 287 

generations. How shall I set to work? It seems to 
me as if I am a trap for drink : I catch it by foreordi- 
nation. I may as well carry^ out the unexpressed 
wishes of those whose legatee and sole executor I am." 

And here is some person who has moments of 
awakening to the consciousness that his chief love is 
avarice. But he comes of a money-making family, 
and the bright round dollars have been the blood- 
disks that circulated to the heart and brain. Its 
proverb, earliest whispered into youthful ears, has 
been, " With all thy understanding get to getting." Is 
it remorse, is it consolation, or is it despair when the 
latest representative of these besotted exemplars might 
be thus expressed : " They took care of the pennies, 
and now the pounds are taking a sarcastic care of me. 
Their small profits are my great undoing. They 
fastened this rag-picker's wallet to my back, and told 
me that the world was my gutter for me to farm. I 
rake it, and the heavier and more intolerable grows 
my pack with the findings I jerk into it, the closer it 
clings around my chest and heart. Will death itself 
undo this accumulation of so many sordid minds? 
Will the soul, that has been bent double by the stoop- 
ing of so many upon it from the past, shoot up to its 
true stature in the kingdom where the dollar does not 
reign ? Welcome the hour that may put me where a 
man cannot take a dollar in exchange for a soul ! " 

We have all seen many persons who appear to us 
quite ruined. Perhaps there is a better judge of that ; 
but, if it be true, the fact is not so revolting to us as 
the shock is which it gives to our natural preferences. 
The most deeply compromised person will prefer to 



288 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

think that health has not become impossible for him ; 
he shares the instinct of nature which struggles des- 
perately to make its growths shapely under gnarled 
conditions. A man clings to his share of a divine 
ideal of recuperation. No number of damaged struct- 
ures can vote down our feeling that supreme Good 
aspires through man to become expressed and organ- 
ized ; it shakes its signals of direction through the 
densest fog that we can exhale. We see the light 
discolored, but do not mistake it for darkness ; we 
observe whence it comes, and trust to its hints regard- 
ing our safety. On various principles of judgment 
preachers declare these men and those women to be 
abandoned. The epithet remands God back to chaos. 
The poet grants us a better glimpse of the hold on 
life that innocence possesses : — 

" I helped a man to die, some few weeks since, 
Warped even from his go-cart to one end — 
The living on princes' smiles, reflected from 
A mighty herd of favorites. No mean trick 
He left untried; and truly well-nigh wormed 
All traces of God's finger out of him. 
Then died, grown old ; and just an hour before — 
Having lain long with blank and soulless eyes — 
He sate up suddenly, and with natural voice 
Said, that in spite of thick air and closed doors 
God told him it was June ; and he knew well, 
Without such telling, hare-bells grew in June; 
And all that kings could ever give or take 
Would not be precious as those blooms to him." 

Does not that precious cherishing snatch a new June 
from the collapse of the body, as a wrecker disentan- 
gles a still living babe from the last freezing strain of 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 289 

a drowned mother? We can only bid our imagina- 
tion frame, in the interest of the universe, at least a 
remonstrance against the destruction of the babe. 
For we must always presume that the faintest pulse 
is a possible chance for the heart to recover its full 
beat. 

The world could transact nothing, and no race could 
ever develop its special felicity, if the ideal of good- 
ness ever deserted its infelicitous men and women. 
But in many a case its continuing becomes tedious as 
a disease. Some of the most finely organized people, 
advantaged by good fathers and mothers who have 
been long dead, never forget that when a good past 
culminates in a man it is the consecrating of a temple 
that has been long building : still they fall into heart- 
broken moments of stupor, flatness, and inanity. 
The body has its dull days and misrepresents the 
weather to the spirit. A shadow makes no noise and 
is never announced : people picking flowers in the 
fields first know of it when the chill slides up to them. 
The body is often the cloud that comes eating up the 
landscape thus. But the mind also has its unhealthy 
tricks : the worst of which among fine people is the 
trick of letting society do all their living for them, the 
defect of holding no great purpose, of having nothing 
dependent upon self-sacrifice, — not one beggar of a 
cause to feed, not one breast of a challenging truth in 
which to flesh the sparkling sword of the ideal, that 
it may draw the blood of heaven, and rejoice to have 
its sparkle thus quenched. Then the noble soul de- 
clares its regrets, and does not scruple to paint deep 
its shame in melancholy upon the cheeks : so deep, 

13 



29O AMERICAN RELIGION. 

as if it would announce to all beholders, "It is too 
late: it is over with me — I am dying of too much 
purposeless purposing. Smattering of many tongues 
has spoiled my mother-tongue. I stammer with petty 
fluency. I have every thing to express and forty noth- 
ings to express it in : an active imagination clapped in 
the social stocks ; an ardent soul, tethered to a peg, 
I eat all that's succulent within my range. Why do 
I not pull up the peg, and exchange my paddock for a 
landscape? Alas, it is too late : my trick of indolence, 
of squeamishness, my one selfish streak, whatever it 
may be, has been spared too long. The peg has 
taken root: so here I am, browsing around and look- 
ing through a rail-fence at the arrival and departure 
of the gods." 

I say to all persons who have these regrets, born of 
vice, of self-indulgence, of physical despondency, or 
of baffled minds : I say to all whose cry declares that 
their ideal is not dead, Burn your ships ! You have 
arrived, but you have run your ships upon the shore 
stern-foremost, and their radiant figure-heads are out 
to sea : look out lest tide and wind float you off from 
the firm feel of the land. This is your time, between 
two tides : over with your freight, and dare to meet, 
by this one resolute rejection of the past, all that you 
dread, — the whole palpable, solid difficulty that lies 
before you. 

" Knowing ourselves, our world, our task so great, 
Our time so brief, — 'tis clear if we refuse 
The means so limited, the tools so rude 
To execute our purpose, life will fleet, 
And we shall fade, and leave our task undone. 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 29I 

Rather, grow wise in time : what though our work 
Be fashioned in despite of their ill-service, 
Be crippled every way ? 'Twere little praise 
Did full resources wait on our good-will 
At every turn." 

What accusations of the corrupt society in Europe 
and America appeal to ears that are reluctant to be- 
lieve the facts ! Pamphlets are written to expose the 
trickery of gold and whiskey rings, of railroad com- 
binations and rivalries, of the lobbying that goes on 
beneath historic panels where moments of abandon- 
ment to great ideas are recorded. Why do we suspect 
the truth with such difficulty, and can hardly tolerate 
the thought that man has lived so long, suffered so 
much, and let the blood of such hearts run away, to 
end in this knavery? Because we inherit a portion of 
the divine imagination, and no society was ever cor- 
rupt enough to extinguish it. When Alaric, in the 
year 408, appeared before Rome, and finally fixed the 
ransom of the city at 6,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 
of silver, the patricians could not scrape enough to- 
gether without melting down some of the statues of 
the gods: among others that of Virtus — Valor. 
That is generally melted away before an Alaric can 
get near enough to demand a ransom. When our old 
parties did it at the bidding of Slavery, it was called 
u effecting a Compromise." But Alaric appeared, 
and the wicked epoch fell strangling in its own blood. 
vSometimes God prefers to wear an uncouth and bar- 
barian aspect rather than leave his Ideal to be gam- 
bled away by the sharpers of mankind. To a dissolute 
society he seems a Goth ; but there is fresh blood in 



292 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

those angry veins, and the light of eternity in those 
intolerable eyes. For mankind is expressly built to. 
perpetuate God's pure intentions : we dream of them 
and aspire to reorganize them as fast as they give hints 
to us of our own hostility. Something greater than 
our greatest vice is shaken by a remembrance of divine 
origin, and wakes up in time to pull back the world 
from the brink. It threatens in the gestures of all 
persons who are only half liberated from our selfish- 
ness : in the workman and the needlewoman it protests 
and frames its piteous indictment ; in the hands of 
the social critic its rapier plays dangerously before 
besotted eyes. Its dire necessity becomes so great 
that it overcomes at length the sexton and the parish- 
committee, elbows through all the sanctity, and 
rushes up the pulpit stairs, imploring and reproachful, 
as though its right had always been to have started 
thence to carry divine nature down among the people. 
No privilege is high enough to look down upon God's 
imagination : for having once conceived his own right 
mind, he devotes eternity to Virtue and the Rights 
of Man. 

The great resource that man first derived from God, 
and all men from him and from each other ever since, 
is this good-will that prolongs the act of creation, and 
keeps us, in spite of failures, still capable to undertake 
morality. It survives the most eccentric periods of 
private or public life, and is so competent, indeed, 
that it seems to select the path to its object that 
lies through evil, as if conscious that there it would 
be tested and toughened, and driven to reality. It has 
a tendency to youthful reverie which is broken up 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 293 

by some extravagance of behavior. Evil cannot be 
justified until God is detected sharpening upon it the 
sword of the spirit : or, shall I say, it is a rude and 
jangling sheath in which the sword blazes to itself 
and bides its time. 

In our first unchartered moments, when we dis- 
cover that Nature can be a bit of a spend-thrift, we 
have a companion better than all with whom we 
sport, and the inner sense reaches for its hand : as 
when a youth, blind-folded for a game, threads by 
some glimmer of seeing or of mere attraction, the 
whole romping scene, and pursues the beauty who 
one day shall be his. Heaven is never in despair ; 
it has watched too many generations and profited 
by their prevailing goodness not to perceive that if 
dissoluteness be out of order, so is cynicism and a 
sceptical temper about ordinary people, if not more 
hostile to an ideal life. So the young persons launch 
their divine gifts upon a stream that is fretted with 
rapids near its head : some make the portages, others 
try the shoot, — the stream more tranquil always lies 
below. There are eddies that carry them into in- 
dulgences of social and material pleasure. The 
parents generally dissuade with a great deal of wise 
shaking of the head, as much as to say, " We've tried 
all that, and seen the folly of it." It is an ideal 
instinct that prompts the children to reply, " Well, 
we would like to see the folly of it too." How lucky 
it is that nobody can decant his old wine into the new 
bottles ! So the youth gets his promotion from the 
nursery to school, to occupation, to love and marriage, 
to the successive disciplines ; and his knowledge of 



294 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

one period never makes him equal to the next one, 
which always has some surprising element that tests 
him on a new side. We have to go storming parallel 
after parallel. Up we run impetuously, with glad 
acclaim, and plant our colors ; before the wind takes 
them, we perceive an inner line that we had not 
suspected. Headlong we go at that too, only to find 
that the busy antagonist has thrown up another ; and 
that also has to be assailed. It is plot and counter- 
plot, mine and counter-mine : reality works, while 
the ideal catches a nap leaning upon its weapon, till, 
as we sink and the colors falter on the last breach, 
we find that death is only a resource and desperate 
ambush of a foe that is sullenly retreating ; and to- 
morrow the Ideal, light-armed, with marching rations 
and the packs all left behind, will buoyantly pursue. 
What a hint of personal immortality is this rela- 
tive imperfection of our experiences ! They suggest 
the absolute perfection which is the plan of every 
soul, like the crumbled scale or bone that taught 
the naturalist the structure, shape, and habits of an 
extinct fish, whose fossil even no man had ever seen. 
One day a fossil is found to justify, in the minutest par- 
ticulars, the infallibility of the scientific imagination. 
Our partial experiences contain, the history of souls 
not yet completed, and they are guarantees given to 
us directly by the divine imagination, the earnest 
of the spirit, that the whole plan must include all 
the time and opportunity needed to fill out the spir- 
itual form. Eternity is in pledge to our successive 
disappointments. Every morning we go down to the 
edge of it like the fishermen of rock-bound coasts, and 



CONSTANCY TO AN IDEAL. 



295 



put off upon it as they do, to fight for their little gains, 
and satisfy the hunger that is as prompt to return as 
the morning. All day we trawl and hunt by various 
devices for our shy sustenance ; and the fruitful infinite 
stretches all around us, so deep and coy that every 
thing is hidden, so deep that every thing is contained. 
Our day sinks into its storm or calm. Over it our 
day breaks with wants that never are appeased. 

What do we care for the expense that this spend- 
thrift, our good-will for God, subjects us to ? If any 
thing is to be melted for a beautiful casting, men 
keep the flame up, and throw in all the fuel in the 
neighborhood. There is nothing too precious to go 
towards making a soul limpid and symmetrical. 
Bernard Palissy, at the end of twenty years spent 
in vain attempts to create a white enamel for his 
pottery, found nothing left but the house he lived in, 
and the fences around it. Not a billet of wood, for 
love or money, to keep up the furnace with. The 
palings were ripped down and thrown in, — the 
enamel had not melted. There was a crashing in the 
house : the children were in dismay ; the wife, assisted 
doubtless by such female friends as had dropped in to 
comfort her, became loud in her reproaches. Bernard 
was breaking up the tables and carrying them off, legs 
and bodies, to the all-consuming fire. Still, the enamel 
did not melt ! There was more crashing and hammer- 
ing in the house : Bernard was tearing up the floors 
to use the planks as fire-wood. Frantic with despair 
the wife rushes off to raise the town against him. She 
was starved out by his pertinacity ; he was fed by his 
idea. And, while she was gone, the anxieties and 



296 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

poverty of twenty years flowed in the clear coating 
that became the rage of kings and connoisseurs. 

Throw every thing into the fire of the Ideal ! — the 
incumbrances of society and pleasure, the frivolous 
amusements, the small talk and idling, the clique feel- 
ings and constraints, the conveniences that make our 
life a curse, the ornaments that dress us in a weight to 
crush us to the dust. Throw fruitless regrets and 
memories, and all the things we are most vain about, 
into the devouring flame. We are clay in the hands 
of the potter. Let all our rubbish melt to make it 
impervious to the weather, not subject to decay, much 
sought for by the King. 



XII. 

THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 

THE mid-winter of America, bringing her shortest 
days, lights them up with gleams from Fore- 
fathers'-Day and Christmas, those anniversaries of two 
births, — of a symbol of human capacity in an ethical 
form, and of a country that offers such capacity the 
largest opportunity it has yet enjoyed. The winter 
solstice never bred so richly before : the midsummers 
of other countries are less fertile. And every annual 
recurrence of these events renews the impression that, 
as the darkest hour is towards morning, and the short- 
est dav light is already turned sunward, so Truth is 
born in a lowly and obscure manner, in out-of-the-way 
places, under cheerless circumstances, amid the buf- 
feting of men and weather, patient as a child, but 
tenacious as a martyr, a giant nursed upon the breast 
of womanly feebleness. It reminds one of Paul's 
paradox, " When I am weak then am I strong" : and 
the most invigorating reflection of the season is, that a 
small and discouraging beginning is the best recom- 
mendation that a man or a principle can have. Human 
Capacity waits eighteen centuries before it engenders 
Human Rights, laid first in a manger, to be floated 
hitherward like a waif of time, and cast away upon a 

x 3* 



298 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

rock : now a Republic has bled and worshipped in its 
name. We feel as if it were a dangerous thing for 
Truth to blossom into ease and splendor. Paul is 
more inspiring amid stripes, fasting, and imprison- 
ment, fighting wild beasts, of body weak and insig- 
nificant, like a dull scabbard hiding a blade tempered 
at Damascus. Peter is more convincing while he 
works at his trade in Rome — that, namely, of tent- 
maker and apostle — than when he lives in the Vatican 
and calls himself a Pope. Peter made tents four years 
for us, and sent men to live in them for the sake of 
Truth. It was the shelter of faith and determination, 
put up and struck more easily than St. Peter's dome, 
which, like a bell-glass, defends show-plants from 
hardihood and usefulness. We welcomed the trials in 
which we lived, and were pleased to see our most 
precious thoughts abroad in that wild weather which 
God summoned from the elements, for it was like all 
Christian and Pilgrim beginnings. We would not have 
had success dawn too soon: victory brings pomp and 
self-laudation ; fortunately for mankind it brings also 
the necessity for a new adventure, a fresh exercise of 
plain and heroic dealing. When a man or a nation 
has done any thing, God seems to say : " What went 
ye out into the wilderness to see? A man clothed in 
soft raiment? They that wear soft clothing are in 
king's houses. But what went ye out for to see? A 
prophet? Yea!" 



We cannot apply to America the saying which grew 
out of a dislike to war: " Happy that nation whose 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 299 

annals are tiresome." But that nation is certainly 
happy which does not forget its annals, if they have 
been written in the blood of its people. 

How long it seems since the men of Lowell and 
Lynn hurried to Baltimore to illustrate a famous date 
in our history, and the men of Ohio and the West sent 
their stiff retort to rebel diplomacy, in the message 
that, for their part, they were continually prepared for 
the "further effusion of blood" if the Republic de- 
manded it, and were not in the habit of surrendering 
much ! The ploughshare, the shuttle, the lap-stone, 
the flail, were converted by the instinct of the men 
who handled them into the bayonets which have 
defended and prolonged their use in the interest of a 
peaceful freedom. Were, it not too painful, memory 
might be freshened by reading the report of the con- 
dition of our prisoners at Andersonville, by treading 
again the wards of hospitals from east to west, follow- 
ing in the wake of rebel barbarity to pick up our dese- 
crated dead, gleaning the smiles and noble glances of 
our wounded who lay content upon fields which their 
blood purchased. What a crucifix the common sol- 
diers found and held up to the adoring gaze of a coun- 
try, to convert it to manly and religious truths ! The 
spirit of the Lord had sent them to preach deliverance 
to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to 
set at liberty them that were bruised. 

How it has faded from our mind, too, that while 
our mechanics fought, their natural brethren of Eng- 
land, the Lancashire cotton-weavers, fought also with 
the awful enginery of patience : for they understood 
that though no cotton came through, yet liberty. 



300 ' AMERICAN RELIGION. 

human rights, the true bread from heaven, were run- 
ning the blockade daily, to bless them at last, and feed 
both mouth and mind. When their employers ex- 
plained to them that the cause of their suffering was 
the American War, they answered, instead of getting 
up Confederate sympathy, " We don't mind suffering 
a bit, if we can only set the poor slaves free." The 
starving weaver saw through the war into a practical 
sympathy with his own class and into liberty for all. 
And surely if Jesus could have seen those poor women 
at a certain mill weep over and kiss, and sing before, 
the first bale of cotton that arrived there, he might 
have said : " These love me better than the women 
who ran after me in Judea, for these have taken up a 
cross : they have refused to weave their sorrows into 
a strand to put around the neck of slaves." 

It was such a real epoch of a cross, that all the sects 
which pretend to exclusive property of that symbol 
forgot to quarrel about it, and ran together into frater- 
nal worship at its foot. The soldier suggested to the 
country its chance to establish a national religion : 
and it is really true that for a time all specific notions 
were swept away. 

Now that the people have gone back again to their 
churches, if there be one recollection capable to res- 
train the old dogmatic emphasis, and to soften the 
features of differences, it must be that the soldier's 
blood was an atonement for sin which liberal and 
orthodox must alike accept, while they delight to 
make the character of the men who shed it a part of 
their scheme of religion. The country is covered with 
its texts : they are the hillocks which you can still 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 3OI 

count, though rain and weather have been gnawing at 
them. They define certain thoughts as sharply as 
ever : so that there is not a child's brain, that first 
woke into attention during those campaigns, that is 
not coordinated by the story. It ought to be his first 
lesson in theology, that manliness is the only sect, and 
faith in natural ideas of justice, of God, and human 
nature, the only body of divinity. 

Just opposite my window rises the steeple of a meet- 
ing-house, and it stands out with great distinctness 
when the rising moon slips behind it and is lost to 
view. I see a special object, like a label or advertise- 
ment of certain commodities to be had within. But it 
is far more cheering when the moon emerges into the 
clear sky, and reflects to me the whole of the light 
which it gathers in one great gaze from that sun be- 
yond my horizon. Then that and all other steeples 
retreat into indistinctness : no particular truth can be 
obtrusive in a heaven that is large enough for all the 
light that can be thrown upon our intelligence. How 
it travels from meridian to meridian, casting scutch 
eons of silver upon all those honorable graves, where 
lie the men who taught us that Character, emerging 
from all the accidents of birth and education, is Amer- 
ican Religion, — faith in God, in Human Nature, and 
in the Moral Law. 

Mr. Lincoln said at Gettysburg : " We here highly 
resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain ; that 
the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of Free- 
dom, and that government of the people, by the people 
and for the people shall not perish from the earth." 
But unless we embrace the religion which inspired 



302 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

these dead men to illustrate more than discipline, more 
than valor and resolution, and which went ranking all 
creeds under one uniform, shoulder to shoulder, to 
level their steel against injustice in the front, and 
to move on its works incessantly, like a climate which 
persists and cannot be abolished, — the dead will have 
died in vain. 

It is well to collect and preserve a few of the per- 
sonal traits of the American soldier. They all seem 
to me to be bone and muscle of his personal religion. 
The soldiers of other nations are brave in the field, 
subtile and adroit in strategy, patient in hardships, 
competent to obey orders, vigilant at the outpost, 
cheerful in all weathers, ready for the blanket around 
the bivouac, or for the shroud of mist which folds 
them in death's sleep upon the field. But the Amer- 
ican combination is peculiar : the soldier's elements 
are differently mixed in him, and dominated by a tem- 
perament that is as distinct from Europe's as our air is, 
which excites more nerves and furnishes less flesh for 
padding. The French soldier is more gay, and inven- 
tive of jests at scars ; but there is a lightness in them 
which the east wind forbids us to imitate. A young 
Lyonnaise soldier wrote thus to his mother after the 
battle of Solferino : " My dear mother, — I am yet 
living, very living, and bon vivant. Only, I am not 
complete like an omnibus when it rains. [ Comfilet is 
the sign put out by the conductor to notify that the 
omnibus is full.] The regimental surgeon has just cut 
off my leg. I was accustomed to have it, and the 
separation has been severe. My sergeant-major, to 
console me, says that I shall now have a leg* made 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 303 

to put a stop to that. Rejoice, my dear mother, in 
your luck, for my wooden leg will keep me at home, 
your dear partner at fiquct. Hold ! there's a tear on 
the paper : it is not a tear of regret, but of gladness at 
the thought of embracing you." 

This is the Gallic vein of lightness, only possible 
to the nation that at Fontenoy yielded precedence in 
firing to the English Guards, but in Algiers could 
smother hundreds of women and children at the com- 
mand of Pelissier, and in the Crimea sent 50,000 
loaves of bread daily to their English allies whose 
ovens were clumsily set up. Ever since Marshal 
Saxe said that battles were not gained with the hands 
but with the feet, they are the children who march, 
bantering Providence on a full or empty stomach, but 
requiring frequent rations of victory to sustain their 
temper. Their camp songs are always gay, but those 
of the Germans are pervaded with melancholy, and 
seem to be set to the distant mutter of cannon which 
retreat after strewing a field with fragments of love 
and domestic longing. For no blaze of battle that 
puts out the hearth-light is great enough to compen- 
sate a German. The French are still first among 
European nations — notwithstanding late events and 
imperial demoralization — in shiftiness to meet and 
overcome the contingencies of war : resource is on the 
spot, and ekes out the sudden failure of camp material, 
and bright repartee is wreaked upon the misfortune 
while it is repairing. But the American mechanic, 
reared in States where poverty has liberty to get abol- 
ished by all kinds of dexterity, and who picks up the 
nearest stick to whittle out of it the school, the church, 



304 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

the daily table, can be matched nowhere on earth for 
absolute superiority to circumstance. Self-respect has 
enjoyed centuries of municipal training, and under- 
stands the advantage of working for a Commonwealth. 
All its talents are nourished by a moral feeling of 
indebtedness to the general prosperity which they are 
so eager to enhance. Other nations have traditions of 
system that encumber their attempts to adjust them- 
selves with unexpected exigencies. But we are not 
hampered by an old chest of tools : if we cannot find 
one of them that is competent to make just the stroke, 
or sink the groove that we need, something is extem- 
porized to solve the problem. Said Governor Andrew : 
" The men we offer, besides fighting, can do any other 
things for which there may be occasion, from digging 
clams up to making pianofortes." 

But these volunteers carried into the field high 
thinking from their low living, and improvised with 
it more bridges across the desperate breaks where 
retreating treason had broken down the country's con- 
science than their hands ever repaired. The dislo- 
cated tracks of fidelity were tied to the soil again by 
men whose village thrift had not impoverished the 
soul. 

It was the distinction of all the better class of volun- 
teers, that they bore not only the brunt of fighting and 
the lassitude of defeat, but all the infirmity and scepti- 
cism of their comrades. And their moral power alone 
made them equal to it. Other men were as dexterous, 
as brave and enduring. The soldiers of other coun- 
tries, who obey the system that recruits them and , 
swallows up their individuality, know what the battle- 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 305 

ardor means, can improvise a meal or a shelter, can 
transport equipments across swift currents, can rally 
round a flag at a drum-tap that interrupts their pangs 
of hunger and promises them the banquet of death. 
Cases of desertion are less numerous than they were 
with us, when the old home pulled the heart-strings, 
or defeat demoralized. Foreign regularity of disci- 
pline, and ubiquitous authority, preserve an army's 
solidarity at the expense of every personal preference. 
But our volunteers were substantial elements of the 
authority which they obeyed : and they took the 
field with something that no other soldier finds in- 
dispensable to his day's rations, — an independent 
moral sense, that elected every situation, preferred 
each drawback, deliberately proposed to see the busi- 
ness out, kept its own sovereign will in command. 
The best men were centres of conscience, planted 
like flags that have received oaths that they shall 
never touch the ground. The silent influence pene- 
trated into every detail, and was the reenforcement 
that came up in time, wherever defeat and unfaith- 
fulness threatened. 

Count Gurowski, living at Washington, kept a 
diary that reflects every shift of the kaleidoscope 
made by variegated policy and the childish worry 
of circumstance. Its pages change from rage to pity 
at the imbecility of leaders and the heroic patience 
of the people. Defeats, mistakes, and absurdities, 
epauletted ignorance, red-tape, and solemn trifling, all 
at the expense of the "poor people," — the deluded, 
the fleeced and patient people. But they were see- 
ing all the time as much as their critic did : they 



306 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

saw one thing more, — namely, that to persevere 
with what they had was salvation, not to shriek and 
declaim about what they had not. Could foreign 
criticism generate great commanders for us? In 
the mean time the instinct of the soldier filled the 
gaps where incompetency fell and vanished. He 
stepped into the place, and showed his commission 
till a better one appeared. That was the miracle, 
that the greatness and the surprise to all the world. 
He secured to Nature time enough to grow her Gen- 
eral, and fought it out on that line three years 
before he came. 

In other lands, "the nerve of standing armies, 
that which alone makes them trust-worthy in war 
and harmless in peace, is an immovably true and 
valorous body of officers." This advantage descended 
probably from the spirit of medieval chivalry, and 
is one of the military traditions of Europe. But the 
trust-worthiness which volunteered for us was not 
designated alone by shoulder-straps, it was a con- 
spicuous distinction of the private. Our mechanic had 
no middle-ages nourishing his blood with sentiments 
of fidelity. The oldest venerable thing he could recall 
was, perhaps, his mother's Bible. But whatever con- 
science went to make that book was shared by him, 
and he could count his ancestors by centuries. 

I knew a boy not fifteen years old, but of a man's 
stature, who tormented his parents to let him enlist. 
But his mother was reluctant. If I ever alluded to 
the war in a sermon, he would go home and say : 
" There, mother ! Did you hear that? Can I stand 
that? " On rainy nights he would get out of his win- 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 307 

dow and pace up and down before the house with an 
old musket as if on picket duty, and was delighted 
that he could not take cold. He was dull at school, 
and his tall head gathered the magisterial thunder- 
cloud, which discharged harmlessly through him, and 
]3rotected the rest of the scholars. 

One day he left the house, turning as he went, and 
simply saying, " Good morning, mother." He was 
gone to the war. Before this he had once enlisted at 
a neighboring camp, but his father brought him back. 
Now, under an assumed name, he found his way into 
the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, and all trace of 
him was lost for a long time. The mother's distress 
was at last relieved by news of him, and they began 
to correspond. He was perfectly happy, but found 
picket-duty rather more complicated than it was be- 
fore the front-yard at home. 

One day in the autumn he took cold and lay dan- 
gerously sick for several weeks. But recovering, he 
went into a skirmish beyond Vienna, was under fire, 
always behaved well, and was always supremely 
happy. One day he took a rebel lieutenant prisoner, 
and brought him into camp. 

But in a few months, when the spring of 1864 
opened, there came an ill-spelled and scarcely legible 
letter from a comrade, announcing at once his sickness 
and his death. He died at his post, for it was on 
picket-duty that the heavy mud drew off both his boots. 
He could not find them again in the darkness, but con- 
tinued all the same to pace his round. He remained 
chilled and drenched till the guard was relieved, — 
then, one step to the hospital ; then, answering to his 



308 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

name as it went on the roster of that army which the 
Lord recruited from ours, he was ordered to the front 
upon another service. 

When he left home he took with him nothing but a 
little Bible, a birthday present from his mother. I 
asked to have this Bible to read from at his funeral. 
On examining it I found that he had marked pas- 
sages, which his sense appropriated, by putting flowers 
between the leaves. There were the dry Virginian flow- 
ers, which had transferred to the texts their sap and fra- 
grance. The old verses bloomed again in the dew of 
his youth. Thus he reenforced Judea with America : 
" Shall I go and smite these Philistines ? And the Lord 
said unto David, Go." This must have been selected 
before he went, and while he pondered his act. There 
was a flower against David's magnanimity, in I Sam. 
xxiv. 4, where David cut off Saul's skirt and left him 
free to go. And there was one against Ps. cv. 42, 43, 
44 : " For he remembered his holy promise, and Abra- 
ham his servant. And he brought forth his people with 
joy, and his chosen with gladness ; and gave them the 
lands of the heathen : and they inherited the laboi 
of the people," — which showed that he understood 
the President, and had his own thoughts on the Con- 
traband question. And on carefully lifting up a rebel 
pansy, which stuck to Rev. xiii. 9, 10, as if to mark 
it, there were words made so apposite by his moral 
selection as almost to startle me: "If any man hath 
an ear to hear, let him hear. He that leadeth into 
captivity shall go into captivity. He that killeth with 
the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is 
the patience and the faith of the saints." So, in the 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 



309 



fragrance of Scripture, which his own moral sense 
enhanced, we laid him away. 

But it was the plain honesty of such action and 
suffering that extemporized a fresh page on which 
the divine in-being wrote its latest word. The boy 
shared the instinct that withstood, and at last destroyed, 
the moral border-stateism that was at first in favor. 
The volunteer answered to every roll-call, because he 
felt that the Republic held the list, pronounced his 
name, and asked his life or death, and was the con- 
science that gave him God's alternative of being on 
his side or against him. This dull, unburnished 
quality of duty staid in the camp and lighted its watch- 
fires long after the first enthusiasm, that filled our 
streets and fused all parties, had burnt down to the 
brands of doubt and dismay. 

Perhaps the disadvantages of the early situation 
challenged this obscure moral power and drew it to 
the front. It is not only when a crowd sees treachery 
at work, but when it is expected also to stand still 
and watch the fumblings of incapacity, that resolu- 
tion is gradually singled out and interferes. It is 
difficult now to recall the aid and comfort which trea- 
son borrowed from our own indifference and selfish- 
ness. One month after his first accession, President 
Lincoln said " he wished he could get time to attend 
to the Southern question ; he thought he knew what 
was wanted, and believed he could do something 
toward quieting the rising discontent, but the office- 
seekers demanded all his time. ' I am like a man so 
busy in letting rooms in one end of his house, that he 
can't stop to put out the fire that is burning the other.' " 



3io 



AMERICAN RELIGION. 



" Sitting here," he continued, " where all the ave- 
nues to public patronage seem to come together in a 
knot, it does appear to me that our people are fast 
approaching the point where it can be said that seven- 
eighths of them are trying to find out how to live at 
the expense of the other eighth." 

And to his former law-partner, Mr. Herndon, he 
said : " If ever this free people, if this government 
itself, is ever utterly demoralized, it will come from 
this human wriggle and struggle for office, — that is, a 
way to live without work." 

It will be remembered that Mr. Lincoln was at 
one time taken suddenly ill with the varioloid. After 
recovering, he remarked to a friend that there was 
some satisfaction in it, after all. It was the first time 
since he had been President that he had had any thing 
he could possibly give, that somebody did not want. 

It puzzled him a good deal, at Washington, to 
know and to get at the root of this dread desire, this 
contagious disease of national robbery in the country's 
death-struggle. These servants of the people must 
have appeared as infamous as the menials who sack 
the house of a dying mistress, and greedily count the 
rings upon her shrunken finger. But what must be 
our reflection to perceive that the abominable greed 
has not been buried in the graves of half a million men, 
but stands upon them to scramble better into place. 
The Assistant Treasurer lately (1869) discharged one 
hundred and twenty-five clerks to economize the Treas- 
ury service ; and out of the whole number there "were 
one hundred that had not even a desk or a chair, or 
any business in the building. So many families in 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 3II 

Washington are decayed, that in order to prevent the 
members from being a tax in" almshouses they are 
made a tax in the different official bureaus. 

Thus the first campaign went on, with treason and 
ravin fastened to the throat of the country, incompe- 
tency and inexperience hugging every limb, unguarded 
expenditure and waste the impudent camp-followers 
of every regiment, and indefinite policy dampening 
every cartridge. Into this border-land the common 
soldier built his road : at one end of it a hearthstone 
that flickered more tremulously than ever with en- 
deared life-breaths, at the other — he could not see 
the head-board at Andersonville and Salisbury at the 
other end, with the road thither blazed by the edge 
of battle. But he went on, after he had discovered 
the piteous direction of his route, and had missed so 
many comrades at the morning-call that he might 
wonder at his exemption. He heard the drum ahead : 
no fog of policy could stifle the crisp rolling that 
voiced the peremptoriness of his plain purpose. 
McClellan was held at telescopic range by the Quaker 
guns at Manassas, went into burrows at Yorktown, 
and at length drifted out of history by clinging to the 
planks of a Chicago platform, torn apart by a rail- 
splitter's hand. The drums grew fainter on his ear, 
with every stroke of the pickaxe and shovel that in- 
trenched him beyond their vibrations. He, and all 
the other Napoleons of the epoch, went where there 
was no chance to count delay by the dropping of 
blood into hesitating palms, and no securing of policy 
by selling out Liberty's marble to be converted into 
grave stones. But the volunteer's well-fibred heart 



312 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

still held together the ravelled line, and its pulse kept 
time with the drum-beat that grew more and more 
expressive, more intelligent with the practice of lib- 
erty. 

We have forgotten the weeks and months of popu- 
lar depression, when the public officials who were 
nearest to the seat of government, or who came back 
from a visit to Washington, where the heavy details 
of mistake and disaster told upon the temper, gave up 
the cause for lost. At periods when voluntariness 
was dying out of volunteers themselves, and depres- 
sion or routine brought in moments of reaction, when 
the mismanagement of the politicians bred disgust, 
our fate lay in the hands of these men, who rallied 
instantly at the approach of genuine danger, and were 
disinfected of their doubts by the prospect of death. 
One thing alone, presumably enough to demoralize 
the firmest men, was the selfish persistence of the 
Northern papers in reporting, as fast as their eager 
and unscrupulous correspondents could gather the 
facts, the number of our troops, their positions, their 
probable movements, and the projects for a campaign. 
This was done that the streets of our cities might be 
filled with the cry of " Extras," fresh editions every 
hour, to build up great newspaper establishments out 
of the peril of thus imparting information to the 
South. The Southern officers used to say that they 
depended upon the North for cheap and accurate in- 
formation — since our papers went into the rebel lines. 
They were worth to the South half the number of 
troops which they reported, and whose positions and 
movements they unmasked. 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 



3*3 



But the common soldier added the load of this 
selfishness to his knapsack, where it hung with the 
other errors and meannesses that found in war their 
opportunity. The weight, however, did not overtax 
him ; and military writers will have to make a fresh 
estimate of the number of pounds which a soldier can 
carry into battle or upon a march. For although our 
determination buoyed up his heart, our delaying and 
distracted measures, our shoddy contracts, our super- 
fluous expenditures, our bickering and political ma- 
noeuvring, clung, like a ball and chain, to every step 
of his advance. 

A day or two after the needless bloodshed of Ball's 
Bluff, where some one had evidently blundered by 
sending our men across the Potomac in a couple of 
leaky flat-boats, to form in the presence of an enemy 
that already exulted to see the advantage of fighting 
soldiers who had the river in their rear, and the two 
boats the only means for retreating, — a Massachusetts 
corporal, picket-guard at the river, seeing a rebel pre- 
paring to bathe from the opposite bank, shouted out 
to him, u Take your feet out of my river, or I'll shoot 
you ! " When we doubted whether we should long 
own the Schuylkill and Hudson, the common soldier's 
geography never misgave him that all the streams, 
from the lakes to the Gulf, ran to transact the com- 
merce of Liberty. The sense of ownership was as 
vivid after a defeat, and loss of ground, as when a 
great victory suddenly put us in possession of a 
State. 

We used to mingle a good deal of exultation with 
the surprise we felt to see how easily a government, 

H 



314 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

without despotic measures, kept in the field armies 
greater than any which have waged the battles of the 
Old World, armed, victualled, clothed, recruited them, 
tended their sick and wounded, held the regimental 
deaths at a figure lower than is confessed by the med- 
ical statistics of England, France and Russia, moved 
the men from point to point rapidly and comfortably 
by such transport-service as was never before organ- 
ized for military operations, delivered an army by 
express, set it down on time, with all its trains and 
baggage, — the whole field-service developed from 
that which corresponded to 10,000 men to that 
which cared for 750,000, the naval arm at the same 
time raised from 5,000 to 75,000, and vessels of novel 
and superior construction added, to the number of 
" 558 steamers, with an aggregate tonnage of 408,000 
tons against the original 26 steamers and 49,700 tons." 
But the country which sprang from a positively supine 
and dismantled condition into that attitude of vigor 
owed it all to common talent and invention : and the 
men we undertook to transport were not machines. 
The intelligence we moved from point to point was a 
part of the motive-power. The individuality which 
flew apart to grumble and criticise — as Washington 
made complaint was the vice of the New-England 
men in his time — came together when the bugle cut 
it short, and every private was Uncle Sam's head man. 
So that when we saw an armed man in the street, we 
only saw ourselves made emphatic : he was our de- 
liberate purpose to have our rights respected. Our 
moral indignation was uniformed, equipped, and re- 
ceived rations in him. When his steel glittered in the 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 315 

front, it was the flash of our eyes in search of treason : 
every cannon's flame was the tongue of our retort 
against the owners and despisers of men. If you 
would have measured the manly sincerity which those 
years of trial brought out of the bosom of the people, 
you would have had to sail with every steamer and 
to march with every corps, computing your steps by 
thousands of miles of sea and land, not to return till 
you had visited every picket-guard and signal station. 
Your journey would lie through the hearts of the men 
before you had inspected all the posts of Liberty. You 
should have been blood itself to travel through the 
new America. Depth of conviction, tenderness of 
feeling, trust in God, newness of life — that was your 
Country. 

Hear a woman,* who was at the time superintend- 
ent of a hospital, describe how Burnside's men went into 
battle. As they passed the Hospital, " they marched 
at ease, laughing, singing, calling out now and then, 
4 Good-by, ladies, good-by ! ' One tall fellow dipped 
his tin cup in a little spring by the road-side and 
drank our healths in passing. c Ave CcesarJ f said 
the Surgeon in charge, ' morituri te salutant? The 
sod was thick with violets, and bunches of them were 
stuck in many caps and coats. A soldier took the 
cluster from his cap-band and gave it to me. G. un- 
fastened a little gilded horse-shoe from her chain and 

* I quote from an admirable pamphlet, privately printed, 
entitled " Hospital Days." 

+ The cry of the Roman gladiators to the emperor, as they 
entered the arena: " Hail, Caesar! those about to die. salute 
thee ! " 



316 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

tied it, by the blue ribbon, in his coat. He lifted his 
cap : ' This will keep me safe in the next battle ; I did 
not expect such good luck in Virginia.' One com- 
pany was singing in parts, — 

' Rally round the Flag, boys, 
Rally once again 1 9 

So they passed, marching and singing, the bayonets 
disappearing at last southward in the spring sunshine, 
in the dust of the Leesburg pike." 

She also describes the passage of the Eighth N. Y. 
Heavy Artillery, in May, 1864, through Fredericks- 
burg, where our troops had previously received a far 
different greeting. " In the headstall of Col. Peter 
Porter's horse we fastened a knot of roses, and tossed 
roses and snow-balls in showers over the men. They 
were delighted. i In Fredericksburg!' they said. 
' Oh, give me one : pray, give me one ! ' — ' I will 
carry it into the fight for you ; ' and another, who 
was a lieutenant, cried, cheerily, ' I will bring it 
back again.' 

" Three days afterwards the ambulances came, and 
in them came some of the same men, shattered, dying, 
dead. We went out, but this time it was with pails 
of soup and milk-punch. One and another recognized 
us — all were cheery enough. C A different coming 
back, ma'am.' — ' No roses to-day? ' — And one said, 
pointing over his shoulder, ' The Lieutenant is there 
on the stretcher, and he's brought back the flowers as 
he promised.' I went to the side, hoping to help a 
wounded man. The lieutenant lay dead, with a bunch 
of dead roses in the breast of his coat." 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 317 

The love of these rough men for loses blossomed even 
in their dreams. A German called G. to his bedside 
one morning to tell her his dream of her. " Last night 
I dreamed," he said, " that I was walking by myself in 
a great city and came to a bridge over a deep river. 
As I crossed the bridge it broke and I fell into the 
water, and was sinking, when you came and drew me 
to land. I was all dripping, and you took me to your 
own house and gave me a whole new suit of clothes, 
all dry and warm. Then you said, ' You may go into 
the garden and take a flower ; take any flower you 
like.' So I took a rose ; but as I was picking it I died 
and went to heaven. You called aloud to me, c Don't 
drop the rose ; take it with you and plant it in heaven 
for me.' So I went to heaven and planted it, and it 
grew and blossomed. And when the blossoms came 
I sent you down word, and you died and came to 
heaven, and found there all ready a rose-tree bloom- 
ing for you." 

A friend of mine pillaged Mrs. Scott's garden in 
Fredericksburg of its various flowers, and made the 
tour of the hospitals, to lay one upon each pillow of 
the wounded and dying. Those who were too far 
gone to speak sent up to him such gratitude from their 
eyes that they haunt him still with its precious quality. 
Others said feebly, " Move it nearer to me, let it touch 
my cheek — I want to feel it." 

A nurse carries a bunch of the first lilacs to a very 
sick New-England soldier. " Now I've got something 
for you," I said, holding them behind me, " just like 
what grows in your front door^ard at home : guess ! " 
" Lalocs," he whispered ; and I laid them on his 



318 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

folded hands. " Oh, Lalocs ! How did you know 
that?' The lilacs outlived him. 

"J. D. was brought in, far gone in fever, and 
speechless. In his pocket were found a red morocco 
Testament, and a poor little note-book, half soaked 
through with rain or swamp-damp, in which a few 
wandering pencil-notes were still legible, and this little 
couplet altered from an old song : — 

" Not a sigh shall tell my story, 
Silent death shall be my glory" 

I will match that last line against the lines on whose 
simple feeling great poets have been floated into fame. 
And what tender trustfulness breathes through these 
lines of an unknown man, S S , a Massachu- 
setts sergeant : — 

" I lay me down to sleep, 

With little thought or care, 
Whether my waking find 
Me here — or There ! 

A bowing, burdened head, 

That only asks to rest, 
Unquestioning, upon 

A loving breast. 

My good right hand forgets 

Its cunning now — 
To march the weary march 

I know not how. 

I am not eager, bold, 

Nor strong — all that is past: 

I am ready Not To Do 
At last — at last! 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 319 

My half-day's work is done, 

And this is all my part: 
I give a patient God 

My patient heart, 

And grasp his banner still, 
Though all its blue be dim ; 

These stripes, no less than stars, 
Lead after Him." 

But we must not forget the prison relics. u What 
hospital nurse has not a bone-ring or trinket carved 
by her men in the wards or in prison?" One gave a 
white cross, saying : U I thought of putting your 
initials on it, but I could not bring myself to put even 
yours on any thing of that shape." But the country 
can bring itself to that. No form so appealing, with 
all its associations, as the cross, that seems to crave 
of us to chisel upon it the names of all those faithful 
and comforting nurses, who bore God's pity to the 
edge of the wrath of battle. 

A soldier, just dying, felt the arms of his nurse 
around him, and he feebly whispered, " Underneath 
are the Everlasting Arms." Which did he mean, 
God, or the " everlasting womanly" that exalts a line 
of Goethe? The one was the other. And a nurse 
says that, as she ministered the last wants to a death- 
struck man, he rallied, looked up at her, and exclaimed 
with all the power he had left, " You are the God- 
blessedest woman I ever saw ! " It was religion, like 
that of the Chevalier Bunsen, who was not too culti- 
vated in theology to confess to his wife in the moment 
of death : " In thy face have I beheld the Eternal." 
Not only America, but God was with Woman in the 



320 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

camp, and the illiterate soldier recognized the face 
of his redemption. 

One of those mediating women said : " Let those 
who have one of the prison rings with two clasped 
hands, that mean, True till Death, keep it as a sacred 
relic. It is the prison sign. The fashion seemed to 
travel underground. I have had it from Texas, At- 
lanta, Columbia, Belle-Isle, Andersonville. It is as 
characteristic as the palm branch of the Catacombs." 

This tender temper of flowers and of the cross be- 
longed to our men who breasted Petersburg, walled 
Vicksburg in with fire, cast off at Atlanta and felt their 
way to the sea, took Mission Ridge at a single run 
through scorching flame, and, as one of them said, 
" saw God at Chattanooga." Flowers will never grow 
next spring as generous with red as they were with 
their blood, nor any so white as their honorable record. 

But their humor matched their tenderness. Short ra- 
tions, long delays, attacks repulsed, nothing quenched 
it. The humor was a kind of bunting run up by 
the spirit to apprize the neighborhood that it still 
lived, and to signal to the country that it was about 
to move on the enemy. 

This elastic vein threw off the weight of the most 
threatening situations, and extemporized a climate in 
the worst of weather. At one time, before Vicksburg, 
our fortune touched its ebb : repeated assaults, drench- 
ing rains and failing commissariat, seemed to portend 
that the soldier's hand would be too feeble to turn the 
key of the Mississippi. It was just the time he selected 
to have his lightest heart and most outrageous humor. 
Nothing was too high to be its victim. A tall officer 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 32 1 

trotting by on a little mule, beneath an enormous 
beaver, received the running fire of the whole line : 
" Come down out of that hat ! I know you're 
there — I see your boots." The bad rations gave 
them exquisite advantage. One man, who had with 
great labor consumed a very hard biscuit, said, in 
reply to a question why he stood in the rain, " he had 
just eaten a biscuit, and wanted to see if he couldn't 
swell it." 

And as the Confederate troops could not by rebelling 
secede from the solidarity of food, I must confess that 
they too found humor a substitute. For humor is a 
brace which tightens around all empty stomachs alike, 
till the laugh pretends to fill them. Gen. " Allegha- 
ny " Johnston, on the march to Bristow Station, in the 
fall of 1863, saw one of his men upon a persimmon 
tree. " What are you doing up there — why arn't 
you with your regiment?" "I am getting 'simmons, 
I am," replied the soldier. " Persimmons ! They're 
not ripe yet — they're too bitter to eat." "Yes, but 
general," persisted the Confederate, " I am trying to 
draw my stomach up to suit the size of my rations. 
If it stays like it is now, I shall starve." 

During the forlorn circumstances around Vicksburg, 
the time of the 17th Corps expired. Did it take the 
opportunity to escape ? It was entitled to thirty days 
furlough if it would reenlist. It reenlisted to a man ; 
and then played upon the enemy the capital bit of 
irony of taking the furlough in the State itself of Mis- 
sissippi, which then belonged to the rebellion. 

This gayety was not cynical and obdurate. When 
at Atlanta, letters arrived from wives and sisters who 

14* 



322 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

were starving upon the neglected farms, and -urged the 
men to return. They, knowing in many cases the des- 
titution of their relatives, turned aside to read, that no 
eye might see what dropped from theirs : then slung 
the knapsack again to help Sherman conquer daily 
bread for 4,000,000 men. 

The irrepressible humor spilled over into the sad- 
ness of hospital life, in spite of chaplains who ap- 
prized the men that death was waiting for them all, 
and who would occasionally prolong the subject till 
the usual afternoon funeral passed by, then bring it in 
neatly, — " Even now one of your comrades is being 
carried to the grave." 

Hilarity was certainly pardonable if possible. Once, 
at least, this vestry-vein was interrupted. A lady 
writes : " I was present at a meeting when a Defender 
rose and said he wished to confess to the brethren 
some particulars of a sinful life. There was once, in 
such a town, a godless youth, he said, and went on 
to paint his career : how at the age of twelve he 
smoked cigars and threw the Bible at his grandmother ; 
at fourteen he played tenpins and went sailing on Sun- 
day ; at sixteen he ran away from home, &c, &c. ; 
and when we expected the usual conclusion, fc And I 
who address you to-night, my friends, am that forsaken 
lad,' he surprised us by clapping his nand on the 
shoulder of an innocent, blushing youth in front of 
him, one of the steadiest boys in camp, and shouting 
his climax, ' Which his name is Asy Allen, and here 
he sets!'" 

The nurses were not backward to encourage the 
propriety of a jest. Mrs. Olnhausen, who added the 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 



323 



practice of surgery to her admirable qualities as a 
nurse, took off half a leg from an Irishman. He 
asked her, " Nurse, d'ye think any young girl would 
marry me now? *' She told him she did not think he 
had quite so good a chance as if he had both, legs off. 

The pith of all these various characteristics of 
talent, temper, and moral feeling, was religious ; and 
the true church of the country was detailed from all 
the meeting-houses, went into the wilderness and lived 
four years under tents, where each creed was allowed 
but its minimum of baggage, and the soul, reduced 
to marching rations, prophecied and prepared the 
way of the Lord. 

" For my part," said Napoleon I., " it is not the 
mystery of the Incarnation which I discover in reli- 
gion, but the mystery of Social Order, which con- 
nects with Heaven an idea of equality which prevents 
the rich from destroying the poor." 

How well this sentiment of a great soldier was 
illustrated by the faith which lay hidden by the theol- 
ogy of Lieut.-Col. Wilder Dwight. He was mortally 
wounded at Antietam, and the chaplain visits him for 
the last time.* 

* The brave and self-sacrificing Chaplain Quint, now of 
New Bedford, cannot be classed with the mortuary ministers 
who added a new terror to death. His visits were those of a 
friend who remembered the home-keeping mothers. Here is 
a different style, a specimen of Un-American religion : " Do 
you believe in a future state ? Yes : well, ah, then you hope 
for better things, there; ah, yes: you will die happy — good 
morning, brother." How many convalescents did this tainted 
diet carry off ? It is no less destructive at home, where its un- 
wholesomeness is adroitly concealed by the bed-side rhetoric 
of the practitioners. 



324 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

" After looking me earnestly in the face, ' Chaplain,' 
said he, C I cannot distinguish your features: what 
more you have to say to me, say now.' (I had, of 
course, remembered his dying condition, and conversed 
accordingly.) I said, ' Colonel, do you trust in God?' 
He answered, with ready firmness and cheerfulness, 
L I do. 9 ' And in the Lord Jesus Christ, your Saviour ? ' 
'I do. 9 ' Then/ said I, ' there is no need of saying 
more.' " 

But what if he had said, " I do not I" Could such 
a technical denial expunge the record of a faithful man, 
or alarm the Divine Being who had been the life- 
breath of his whole devoted career? There is One 
who accepts the religion which obeys the orders for 
the day ; its voice drowns the phrases of all our men- 
tal methods, so that the Infinite must be glad that it 
cannot overhear. 

Doubtless his friendly chaplain would allege that 
the soldier's service was the result of his belief in 
a supernatural mediator, and that he could neither 
have denied its source nor derived it by any other 
method. If so, then there could have been no service 
in the army save upon condition of this prelimi- 
nary belief. The campaigns are themselves the con- 
tradiction of this narrow view ; for the unbelievers 
in an atoning sacrifice offered up themselves to be 
a ransom for many, with a heartiness that the stiffest 
churchmen never surpassed. Conscience and hardi- 
hood had reached the camp by no miraculous transpor- 
tation, and bade the creeds stand aside to let Religion 
reach the front. Cowardice and shirking came too, 
and illustrated their independence of theology. It is 



THE AMERICAN SOLDIER. 325 

strange the theologians cannot see that the war has been 
a denial, of the most sublime and impressive kind, of 
the necessity of their supernatural schemes. This les- 
son of the divine impartiality stands by the side of 
emancipation to attract the regards of a grateful coun- 
try, and to modify its future. Valor, and duty unto 
death, have passed into the consciousness of America ; 
they survive there as perpetual witnesses against the 
wretched obtrusiveness of miracle and dogma. 

But Chaplain Quint reached the heart of the matter, 
and doubtless of his own prevailing view in holding 
this last conversation, when he said : " Now what 
shall I say to your mother? He answered, with his 
whole face lighted up, ' My mother ! Tell her I do 
love my mother? ( He emphasized every word.) 
' Tell her / do trust in God, 1 do trust in the Lord 
Jesus.' " 

His mother was the divine life that kindled that 
dying flame, and blew it across the sinking face to 
animate it into a last expression of immortal confi- 
dence. Such sons, if any, are born of an immaculate 
conception. It is the constantly repeated miracle of 
lives that are unselfishly devoted to the service of lib- 
eral and emancipating principles. He had previously 
said, " He was ready to die. As for the future, 
there was but one hope : no putting forward of one's 
own claims, but reliance on the merits of Another" 
Thus spoke the traditionally nurtured intellect of one 
whose practical life illustrated self-reliance in the 
camp and on the field of battle, and the happiness 
of being well-born into an inheritance of cheerfulness, 
valor, and devotedness. He was a model to officer 



3^6 AMERICAN RELIGION. 

and private, and in the blackest hour always prophe- 
cied that the dawn was breaking. One of his last 
requests was that the flag might be brought to him, 
and that the regimental band would play the " Star- 
Spangled Banner." As the strains ceased, he repeated 
the last line, and said fervently, u I hope that glori- 
ous old flag will wave over this whole country again. 
So may it be ! So shall it be I " And so it will be, 
not through the effect of his technical religion, but 
through the conquering power of such personal faith 
and self-surrender. How the pet phrases of the differ- 
ent denominations crumble like moth-eaten paper away 
from the touch, as we turn to slake our thirst with 
the blood of his mortal wound and the tears of his 
mother ! 

What shall we exact as the ransom of the glorious 
bitterness of these recollections? That the flag shall 
wave over a completed freedom, such as the natural 
religion of the soldiers' hearts inspired them to expect. 
They must not be balked of their expectation. " Wher- 
ever the army goes," said D wight, " there springs up 
emancipation." But that is a plant without a blossom, 
and promise of no fruit, till every prejudice has been 
drowned in the memory of soldiers' blood, that perfect 
equality and opportunity may range the poorest and 
most proscribed men in the country by the side of her 
true interests, and we all step together, over the graves 
of our heroes, to the strains of moral union, to take pos- 
session of that future when not one rebel shall be left 
to think meanly of our dead. 



ARTHUR H ELPS'S WRITINGS. 

1. REALMAH. A Story. Price $2.00. 

2. CASIMIR MAREMMA. A Novel. Price $2.00. 

^. COMPANIONS OF MY SOLITUDE, Price $1.50. 
4. ESSAYS WRITTEN IN THE INTERVALS OF BUS 

INESS. Price $1.50. 
<j. BREVIA Short Essays and Aphorisms. Price $1.50. 

From the London Review, 

11 The tale (Realmah) is a comparatively brief one, intersected by the 
conversations of a variety of able personages, with most of whose names 
and characters we are already familiar through ' Friends in Council.' 
Looking at it in connection with the social and political lessons that are 
wrapt up in it, we may fairly attribute to it a higher value than could pos- 
sibly attach to a common piece of fiction. " 

From a Notice by Miss E. M. Converse. 

" There are many reasons why we like this irregular book (Realmah), in 
which we should find the dialogue tedious without the story; the story dull 
without the dialogue ; and the whole unmeaning, unless we discerned the 
purpose of the author underlying the lines, and interweaving, now here, 
now there, a criticism, a suggestion, an aphorism, a quaint illustration, an 
exhortation, a metaphysical deduction, or a moral inference. 

" We like a book in which we are not bound to read consecutively, whose 
leaves we can turn at pleasure and find on every page something to amuse, 
interest, and instruct. It is like a charming walk in the woods in early 
summer, where we are attracted now to a lowly flower half hidden under 
soft moss ; now to a shrub brilliant with showy blossoms ; now to the gran- 
deur of a spreading tree; now to a bit o*" fleecy cloud; and now to the blue 
of the overarching sky. 

" We gladly place ' Realmah' on the l book-lined wall,' by the side of 
other chosen friends, — the sharp, terse sayings of the ' Doctor ' ; the sug- 
gestive utterances of the * Noctes '; the sparkling and brilliant thoughts of 

* Montaigne ' ; and the gentle teachings of the charming ' Elia.' n 

From a Notice by Miss H. W. Preston. 
•' It must be because the reading world is unregenerate that Arthur Helps 
is not a general favorite. Somebody once said (was it Ruskin, at whose 
imperious order so many of us read * Friends in Council,' a dozen years 
ago?) that appreciation of Helps is a sure test of culture. Not so much 
that, one may suggest, as of a certain native fineness and excellence of 
mind. The impression prevails among some of those who do not read him, 
that Helps is a hard writer. Nothing could be more erroneous. His man- 
ner is simplicity itself; his speech always winning, and of a silvery dis- 
tinctness. There are hosts of ravenous readers, lively and capable, who, 
if their vague prejudice were removed, would exceedingly enjoy the gentle 
wit, the unassuming wisdom, and the refreshing originality of the author 
in question. There are men and women, mostly young, with souls that 
sometimes weary of the serials, who need nothing so much as a persuasive 
guide to the study of worthier and more enduring literature. For most of 
those who read novels with avidity are capable of reading something else 
with avidity, if they only knew it. And such a guide, and pleasantest of all 
such guides, is Arthur Helps. * * Yet 'Casiirrir Maremma' is a charming 
book, and, better still, invigorating. Try it. You are going into the country 
for the summer months that remain. Have l Casimir' with you, and have 

* Realmah,' too. The former is the pleasanter book, the latter the more pow- 
erful. But if you like one you will like the other. At the least you will rise 
from their perusal with a grateful sense of having been received for a time 
into a select and happy circle, where intellectual breeding is perfect, and the 
struggle for brilliancy unknown. 

Sold everywhere. Mailed, post-paid, on receipt of adver- 
tised price, by the Publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



THE HANDY VOLUME SERIES. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers propose to issue, under the above 
heading, a Series of Handy Volumes, which shall be at once various, 
valuable, and popular, — their size a most convenient one, their typogra- 
phy of the very best, and their price extremely low. They will enter- 
tain the reader with poetry a6 well as with prose; now with fiction, then 
with fact; herewith narration, there with inquiry; in some cases with 
the works of living authors, in others with the works of those long since 
dead. It is hoped that they will prove to be either amusing or instruc- 
tive, sometimes curious, often valuable, always handy. Each Volume 
will, as a rule, form a work complete in itself. 



THE HANDY VOLUME SERIES. 
1. 

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Other volumes will follow the above at convenient intervals. 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, Boston. 

14 



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